Now I expected nothing but to get fired out as soon as ever I went into the store, so I just tried a little dodge.
“Say!” I says. “Mr. Brady wants to know who you sold this hat to?”
Silverstein looked as though he’d like to eat me. They say he sells policy slips as well as hats, and I reckoned on that to make him afraid.
“Mein freund, how I can be ogspeged to know efery hat vat I sells. Who I sells him to--huh?”
“Mr. Brady don’t want to know who you sell all your hats to,” I say, “he only wants to know who you sold this one to.”
Silverstein took the hat and examined it closely.
“Vell, I tells you,” he said, slowly. “I onderstand vat Mr. Brady vants. Dis hat I sells to an old gustomer vat’s named Camm.”
“Yes, yes. But where did you deliver it; or did he take it with him when he bought it?”
“I send him,” says Silverstein. It was like pulling teeth to get a word out of him, but I saw that sooner or later he meant to tell.
He looked in his order book and told me it was a certain number on Rockaway avenue, which, by the way, was in that part of Brooklyn then known as East New York.
At that time it was all lots out there, with only a few straggling houses and plenty of geese, goats and pigs. It’s a little better now, but as it was then I wouldn’t have lived there if they’d given me a house rent free.
I went out to East New York late that afternoon, for I wanted to talk to Old King Brady first off, and I had to wait for him to come in.
“You’re on the right track,” he said. “Go, and good luck go with you. Do you think you can arrest him if you happen to get the chance?”
“Well, now, there’ll be a rough fight if he gets away from me,” I says.
“Go on,” he says, “and don’t let me see you again till you have something to report.”
Now that kind of worried me, for I didn’t feel at all sure that I was going to find my man just because I’d got the number of the house where he sent the hat.
On the way out to East New York I got to thinking suppose I was the defaulter what would I do?
Would I come back to the city and run the risk of being taken if I was hiding out there in the lots?
“Not much!” I says to myself. “I’d just keep right on by the Long Island railroad, get to Greenport and cross over to New London, where I could take the train on the Northern railroad straight to Montreal.”