"Don’t make me laugh," the derelict interrupted: "me lip’s cracked. The Mayor and the District-Attorney’s got to get elected, whoever they are, don’t they?"
"Well, then. Tony an’ his kind gets the votes. They can’t elect without the Tony kind says so. It’s a fair trade. An’ the Mayors an’ the District-Attorneys ain’t got no easy thing of it, neither. Votes costs money. They’ve got to get the money from the money-guys, the candidates do, an’ then they’ve got to let the money-guys kill as many people as they wants to on their railroads without sendin’ them to jail for it.—Have another?"
"This one’s on me," said the other man, and he paid for the order. "No, sir," he went on, as they were finishing their second drink together, "there’s only two sorts o’ men that ain’t tied up. One sort’s me that knows things an’ ain’t afraid to starve (there’s lots of me); the other sort’s the guys at the top that does the tyin’, an’ there’s only a few of them, with the King as the boss-knotter."
But he had guessed the answer before the derelict gave it: the answer was the man that Porcellis considered the greatest American.....
All the way to his apartments in Thirty-ninth Street that night, Luke’s feet were pounding to the wretched derelict’s wretched hymn:
"_Hall_eyloolyah, I’m a bum—bum! Halleyloolyah, bum again!"
On a morning of that same April in a large rear room on the twentieth floor of a Wall Street skyscraper, three men were seated around a large mahogany table. They were talking business. Each man had his own offices and his own businesses, but they frequently and quietly met in this, the inner office of one, because most of the businesses of each were closely connected, at several points, with the business interests of all.
There was nothing unusual about the outward appearance of the public actions of this trio; they were apparently but three units of the legion that makes this portion of New York a city by day and a desert by night. Each had come downtown in his own motor that morning, defying speed laws and traffic regulations, just as scores of his business neighbors had done. Each had descended at his own offices, passed through a half-dozen doors guarded by six bowing attendants, and proceeded to his own desk in his own private room, precisely as a small army of other business men were doing at the same time within a radius of half a mile. Each looked like the rest of that army. All three were men of about the average in height, not noticeably either above or below it, and inclined to bulkiness. They had pale faces and close mouths and quiet eyes, which looked out upon the world from under bushy brows with glances that gave the lie to the lethargic indications of the little pouches of loose skin below their lower lids. Each man wore a flower in the lapel of his dark coat; one wore a white waistcoat; the cropped mustache of one was black; that of another was touched with gray; the man at the head of the table was clean-shaven.