The owner of the shop, having been hastily summoned, would return to demand angrily what the rumpus was all about. By this time the clerk would have recovered his wits sufficiently to denounce the proceeding as an outrage and the suit as baseless. But his master, who saw judgment against himself for sixty dollars and his goods actually under attachment, was usually in no mood to listen to, much less believe, his clerk's explanations. At all events, they availed naught, when Levine, with an expression of horror at such deliberate mendacity on the part of the clerk, was wont to say:
"Ask him, pray, whether he has not got the watch in his pocket at this very moment!"
Usually this was indeed the fact, as the clerk had no idea what else to do with it until Levine should return.
"So-ho!" his master would shout wrathfully. "What do you mean by saying that you did not agree to buy the watch? Why, you have kept it all the time! What's more, you've pretended to buy it in my name! And now my shop is turned into a bear garden and there is a judgment against me and my goods are attached! A fine result of your extravagance!"
"But I never agreed to buy it!" insists the clerk. "This man left it here on approval!"
"Pish!" answers the employer. "That is all very well; but what have you to say to the judgment of the court? Now, my fine fellow, you will either pay up this money that you owe or I'll advance it myself and take it out of your wages."
In every case, despite the protests of the clerk, the money would be handed over and the shop released from levy. Unfortunately, after working the game for several years, Levine came a cropper by carelessly trying it on one of the same clerks that he had victimized some time before. The clerk, being of an unusually vindictive disposition, followed the matter up. Having first arrested the man who made the false affidavit of service, he induced him to turn State's evidence against my client and landed the latter in jail. Being a great reader, however, Levine did not find his incarceration particularly unpleasant; and, hearing of the Court of Appeals decision in the McDuff case, he spent his time in devising new schemes to take the place of his now antiquated specialty. On his release he immediately became a famous "sick engineer" and for a long time enjoyed the greatest prosperity, until one of his friends victimized him at his own game by inducing him to bet ten thousand dollars on the outcome of a prize-fight that he was simple-minded enough to believe had already been fought and won.