Louis Ersten, who puffed redly wherever he did not grayly bristle, met Johnny Gamble half-way. Johnny's half consisted in stating that he had come to see Mr. Ersten in reference to his lease. Mr. Ersten's half consisted in flatly declining to discuss that subject on the premises.
"Here—I make ladies' suits," he explained. "If you come about such a business, with good recommendations from my customers, I talk with you. Otherwise not."
"I'll talk any place you say," consented Johnny. "Where do you lunch?"
"At August Schoppenvoll's," replied Mr. Ersten with no hint of an intention to disclose where August Schoppenvoll's place might be. "At lunch-time I talk no business; I eat."
The speculator studied those forbidding bushy brows in silence for a moment. Beneath them, between heavy lids, glowed a pair of very stern gray eyes; but at the outward corner of each eye were two deep, diverging creases, which belied some of the sternness.
"Where do you sleep?" Johnny asked.
"I don't talk business in my sleep," asserted Mr. Ersten stoutly, and then he laughed with considerable heartiness, pleased immensely with his own joke and not noticing that it was more than half Johnny's. After all, Johnny had only implied it; he had said it! Accordingly he relented a trifle. "From four to half-past five, at Schoppenvoll's, I play skat," he added.
"Thank you," said Johnny briskly, and started for the nearest telephone directory. "I'll drop in on you."
"Well," returned Ersten resignedly, "it won't do you any good."
Johnny grinned and went out, having first made a swift but careful estimate of Ersten's room, accommodations and requirements. Outside, he studied the surrounding property, then called on a real estate firm.
At four-ten he went into the dim little basement wine-room of Schoppenvoll. He had timed this to a nicety, hoping to arrive just after the greetings were over and before the game had begun, and he accomplished that purpose; for, with the well-thumbed cards lying between them and three half-emptied steins of beer on the table, Ersten was opposite a pink-faced man with curly gray hair, whose clothes sat upon his slightly portly person with fashion-plate precision. It was this very same suit about which Ersten was talking when Johnny entered.
"Na, Kurzerhosen," he said with a trace of pathos in his guttural voice, "when you die we have no more suits of clothes like that."
"I thank you," returned the flexible soft voice of Kurzerhosen. "It is like the work you make in your ladies' garments, Ersten. When you die we shall have no more good walking clothes for our womenfolks."
"And when Schoppenvoll dies we have no more good wine," declared Ersten with conviction and a wave of his hand as Schoppenvoll approached them with an inordinately long-necked bottle, balancing it carefully on its side.
Johnny had drawn near the table now, but no one saw him, for this moment was one of deep gravity. Schoppenvoll, a tall, straight-backed man with the dignity of a major, a waving gray pompadour, and a clean-cut face that might have belonged to a Beethoven, set down the tray at the very edge of the table and slid it gently into place. An overgrown fat boy, with his sleeves rolled to his shoulders, brought three shining glasses, three bottles of Glanzen Wasser and a corkscrew.
It was at this most inopportune time that Johnny Gamble spoke.
"Well, Mr. Ersten," he cheerfully observed, "I've come round to make you an offer for that lease."
Mr. Ersten, his gnarled eyebrows bent upon the sacred ceremony about to be performed, looked up with a grunt—and immediately returned to his business. Mr. Kurzerhosen glanced round for an instant in frowning appeal. Mr. Schoppenvoll paid no attention whatever to the interruption. He gave an exhibition of cork-pulling which a watchmaker might have envied for its delicacy; he poured the tall glasses half-full of the clear amber fluid and opened the bottles of Glanzen Wasser. The three friends, Schoppenvoll now sitting, clinked their steins solemnly and emptied them. Ersten wiped the foam from his bristling gray mustache.
"About that lease I have nothing to say," he told Johnny, fixing a stern eye upon him. "I will not sell it."
The other gentlemen of the party looked upon the stranger as an unforgivable interloper.
"I'm prepared to make you a very good offer for it," insisted Johnny. "I have a better location for you, not half a block away, and I've taken an option on a long-time lease for it."
The stolid boy removed the steins. The three gentlemen poured the Glanzen Wasser into their wine.
"I will not sell the lease," announced Ersten with such calm finality that Johnny apologized for the intrusion and withdrew. As he went out, Ersten and Kurzerhosen and Schoppenvoll, in blissful forgetfulness of him, raised their glasses for the first delicious sip of the Rheinthranen, of which there were only two hundred and eighty precious bottles left in the world.
Outside, Johnny hailed a passing taxi. He called on Morton Washer, on Ben Courtney, on Colonel Bouncer, and even on Candy-King Slosher; but to no purpose. Finally he descended upon iron-hard Joe Close.
"Do you know anybody who knows Louis Ersten, the ladies' tailor?" he asked almost automatically.
"Ersten?" replied Close unexpectedly. "I've quarreled with him for thirty years. He banks with me."
"Start a quarrel for me," requested Johnny. "I've been down to look him over. I can do business with him if he'll listen."
Close smiled.
"I doubt it," he rejoined. "Ersten has just lost the coat cutter who helped him build up his business, and he's soured on everything in the world but Schoppenvoll's and skat and Rheinthranen."
"Could I learn to play skat in about a day?" inquired Johnny.
"You have no German ancestors, have you?" retorted Close.
"No."
"Then you couldn't learn it in a thousand years!"
"I have to find his weak spot," Johnny persisted. "If you'll just make him talk with me I'll do the rest."
Close shook his head and sighed.
"I'll try," he agreed, "but I feel about as hopeful as I would be of persuading a bull to sleep in a red blanket."
Johnny had caught Close as he was leaving his club for home, and they went round immediately to Schoppenvoll's. At exactly five-thirty Ersten emerged from the wine-room with Kurzerhosen.
"Hello, Louis!" hailed the waiting Close. "Jump into the taxi here, and I'll take you down to your train."
Ersten and Kurzerhosen looked at each other.
"Always we walk," declared Ersten.
"There's room for both of you," laughed Close, shaking hands with Kurzerhosen.
Ersten sighed.
"Always we walk," he grumbled, but he climbed in.
When they were started for the terminal Ersten leaned forward, with his bushy brows lowering, and glared Close sternly in the eye.
"I will not sell the lease!" he avowed before a word had been spoken.
"We know that," admitted Close; "but why?"
Ersten hesitated a moment.
"Oh, well; I tell you," he consented with an almost malignant glance in the direction of Johnny. "All my customers know me in that place."
"Your customers would find you anywhere," Close complimented him.
"Maybe they do," admitted Ersten. "My cousin, Otto Gruber, had a fine saloon business. He moved across the street—and broke up."
"It was not the same," Close assured him. "In saloons, men want to feel at home. In your business, your customers come because they get the best—and they care nothing for the shop itself."
"They like the place," asserted Ersten. "I've made a good living there for almost forty years. Why should I move?"
"Because you would be nearer Fifth Avenue," Johnny ventured to interject, and spoke to the chauffeur, who drew up to the curb. "This is the place I have in mind, Mr. Ersten."
"They come to me where I am," insisted Ersten, refusing to look, with unglazed eyes.
"You have no such show-windows," persisted Johnny.
"My customers know my goods inside."
"There's a big light gallery—twice the size of your present workrooms."
Ersten's cheeks suddenly puffed and his forehead purpled, while every hair on his head and face stuck straight out.
"My workroom is good enough!" he exploded. "I told it to Schnitt!"
"Is Schnitt your coat cutter?" asked Johnny, remembering what Constance and Close had said.
Ersten glowered at him.
"He was. Thirty-seven years he worked with me; then he tried to run my business. He is gone. Let him go!"
"He objected to the light in the workroom, didn't he?" went on the cross-examiner, carefully piecing the situation together bit by bit.
"He could see for thirty-seven years, till everybody talks about moving; then he goes crazy," blurted Ersten.
"Won't you look at this place?" he was urged. "Let me show it to you to-morrow."
"I stay where I am," sullenly declared Ersten, still angry. "We miss my train."
Close told the driver to go on. Before Ersten alighted at the terminal, Johnny made one more attempt upon him.
"If a majority of your best customers insisted that they liked the new shop better would you look at the other place?" he asked.
"My customers don't run my business either!" he puffed.
"Good-by," stated Mr. Kurzerhosen, who had been looking steadily at the opposite side of the street throughout the journey. "I thank you."
Close stared at Johnny in silence for a moment after their guests had gone.
"I told you so," he said. "You'll have to give him up as a bad job."
"He's beginning to look like a good job," asserted Johnny. "He can be handled like wax, but you have to melt him. Schnitt's the real reason. Do you know Schnitt?"
"I am happy to say I do not," laughed Close. "One like Ersten is enough."
"Somebody must lead me to him," declared Johnny. "I'm going to see Schnitt in the morning. I'd call to-night if I didn't have to be the big works at a Coney Island dinner party."
"I don't see how Schnitt can help you," puzzled Close.
"He's the tack in the tire. I can see what happened as well as if I had been there. Ersten knew he ought to move. Lofty tried to buy him and Schnitt tried to force him. Then he got his Dutch up. Schnitt left on account of it. Now Ersten won't do anything."
"You can't budge him an inch," prophesied the banker. "I know him."
"I'll coax him," stated Johnny determinedly. "There's a profit in him, and I have to have it!"
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