The Sin of Monsieur Pettipon Part 25

"Now, looky here, Mr. Hammer," he began. "The Western works made 9,576,491 cakes of Pink Petal Toilet last year. Now the cost a cake was--" and so on. Horace was on familiar ground now. Figures and statistics tripped from his tongue; the details he had bottled up inside him so long came pouring forth. He knew the business of the Amalgamated down to the last stamp and rubber band. Oren Hammer, listening with keen interest, now and then put in a short, direct question. Horace Nimms snapped back short, direct answers. Once launched, he forgot all about the cutaway coat and the dazzling top hat and even about the big-jawed man who washed the faces of forty million people every morning. Horace was talking to get back into his cage and words came with a new-found eloquence.

"By George," exclaimed President Hammer, "you know more about the business than I do myself! And Cowan told you you didn't have a figuring mind, did he? I want you to report at my office the first thing to-morrow morning."

Horace Nimms, in the black suit he saved for funerals and weddings, and a new tie, was ushered into the big office of President Hammer the next morning. Outwardly, it was his hope, he was calm; inwardly, he knew, he was quaking.

"Have a cigar, Nimms," said Oren Hammer, pa.s.sing Horace one of the presidential perfectos of his dreams. Then he summoned a secretary.

"Ask Mr. Cowan to come in, will you?" he said.

The efficiency expert extraordinary entered, beaming affably.

"Good morning to you, Mr. Hammer," he called out in a cheery voice. Then he stopped short as he recognized Horace.

"Oh, come here, Cowan," said President Hammer genially. "Before you go I want you to meet Mr. Nimms. He is going to install a new cost-accounting system for us. Just step down to the cashier's cage with him, will you, and get your salary to date."

VII: _Where is the Tropic of Capricorn?_

"One, two, three, bend! One, two, three, bend!" So barked the physical instructor, a bulgy man with muscles popping out all over him as if his skin had been stuffed with hard-boiled eggs.

Little Peter Mullaney oned, twoed, threed and bent with such earnest and whole-hearted violence that his blue eyes seemed likely to be jostled from their sockets and the freckles to be jarred loose from his thin, wiry arms. Though breathless, and not a little sinew-sore from the stiff setting-up exercises, his small, sharp-jawed face wore a beatified look, the look that bespeaks the rare, ecstatic thrill that comes to mortals so seldom in this life of taxes, prohibitions and denied ambitions. Such a look might a hero-worshiping boy wear if seen by his gang in the company of Jack Dempsey, or a writer if caught in the act of taking tea with Shaw. Peter Mullaney was standing at the very door of his life's ambition; he was about to be taken "on the cops."

To be taken "on the cops"--the phrase is departmental argot and is in common use by those who enjoy that distinction--this had been the ideal of Peter Mullaney since the days when he, an undersized infant, had tottered around his Christopher Street back-yard, an improvised broom-stick billy in his hand, solemnly arresting and incarcerating his small companions. To wear that spruce, bra.s.s-b.u.t.ton studded blue uniform, and that glittering silver shield, to twirl a well-trained night-stick on its cord, to eye the layman with the cold, impa.s.sive eye of authority, to whisper mysterious messages into red iron signal boxes on street-corners, to succor the held-up citizen and pursue the crook to his underworld lair, to be addressed as "Officer"--he had lived for this dream.

And here he was, the last man on a row of thirty panting, perspiring probationary patrolmen, ranged, according to height, across the gymnasium of the police training school. From big Dan Mack, six feet four in his socks, they graded down as gently as a ramp to little Peter on the end of the line a scant, a bare five feet five and seven-eighths inches tall including the defiant bristle of his red pompadour.

Peter was happy, and with reason. It was by no generous margin that Peter had gained admission to the school that was to prepare him for his career. By the sheerest luck he had escaped being cast into the exterior darkness; by the slimmest degree he had wiggled into the school, and whether he could attain the goal on which he had kept his eye for twenty years--or ever since he was four--was still decidedly in doubt. The law said in plain, inexorable black and white that the minimum height a policeman can be is five feet and six inches. Peter Mullaney lacked that stature by the distance between a b.u.mble-bee's eyes; and this, despite the fact that for years he had sought most strenuously, by exercise, diet and even torture to stretch out his body to the required five feet six. When he was eighteen and it seemed certain that an unsympathetic fate had meant him to be a short man, his father found him one day in the attic, lashed to a beam, with a box full of window-weights tied to his feet, and his face gray with pain.

"Shure, me bye," remarked old man Mullaney as he cut Peter down, "are ye after thinkin' that the Mullaneys is made of Injy rubber? Don't it say in the Bible, 'What man by takin' thought can add a Cupid to his statue?'"

Peter, in hot and anguished rebellion against this all too evident law of nature had sought relief by going straight out of the house and licking the first boy he met who was twice as big as he was, in a fight that is still remembered in the Second Ward. But stretching and wishing and even eating unpleasant and expensive tablets, alleged by their makers to be made from giraffes' glands, did not bring Peter up to a full and unquestionable five feet six.

When Peter came up for a preliminary examination which was to determine whether he possessed the material from which policemen are made, Commissioner Kondorman, as coldly scientific as his steel scales and measures, surveyed the stricken Peter, as he stood there on the scales, his freckles in high relief on his skin, for he was pale all over at the thought that he might be rejected.

"Candidate Mullaney," said the Commissioner, "you're too short."

Peter felt marble lumps swelling in his throat.

"If you'd only give me a chance, Commissioner," he was able to gulp out, "I'd----"

Commissioner Kondorman, who had been studying the records spread on his desk, cut the supplicant short with:

"Your marks in the other tests are pretty good, though you seem a little weak in general education. But your strength test is unusually high for a small man. However, regulations are regulations and I believe in sticking to them. Next candidate!"

Peter did not go.

"Commissioner," he began urgently, "all I ask is a chance----"

His eyes were tense and pleading.

The Chief Inspector, grizzled Matthew McCabe, plucked at the Commissioner's coat-sleeve.

"Well, Chief?" inquired Commissioner Kondorman, a little impatiently.

"He's a good lad," put in the Chief Inspector, "and well spoke of in the Second Ward."

"He's under height," said the Commissioner, briefly.

"But he knows how to handle his fists," argued the old Chief Inspector.

"Does he?" said the Commissioner, skeptically. "He looks rather small."

He examined Peter through his eye-gla.s.ses; beneath that chill and critical gaze Peter felt that he had shrunk to the size of a bantam rooster; the lumps in his throat were almost choking him; in an agony of desperation, he cried,

"Bring in the biggest man you got. I'll fight him."

The Commissioner's face was set in hard, and one would have thought, immovable lines, yet he achieved the feat of turning up, ever so slightly, the corners of his lips in an expression which might pa.s.s as the germ of a smile, as he gazed at the small, nude, freckled figure before him with its vivid shaving-brush hair, its intense eyes and its clenched fists posed in approved prize-ring form. Again the official bent over the records and studied them.

"Character recommendations seem pretty good," he mused. "Never has used tobacco or liquor----"

"'Fraid it might stunt me," muttered Peter, "so I couldn't get on the cops."

The commissioner stared at him with one degree more of interest.

"Give the lad a chance," urged the Chief Inspector. "He only lacks a fraction of an inch. He may grow."

"Now, Chief," said the Commissioner turning to the official by his side, "you know I'm a stickler for the rules. What's the good of saying officers must be five feet six and then taking men who are shorter?"

"You know how badly we need men," shrugged the Chief Inspector, "and Mullaney here strikes me as having the making of a good cop. It will do no harm to try him out."

The Commissioner considered for a moment. Then he wheeled round and faced Peter Mullaney.

"You've asked for a chance," he shot out. "You'll get it. You can attend police training school for three months. I'll waive the fact that you're below the required height, for the time being. But if in your final examinations you don't get excellent marks in every branch, by the Lord Harry, you get no shield from me. Do you understand? One slip, and good-by to you. Next candidate!"

They had to guide Peter Mullaney back to his clothes; he was in a dazed blur of happiness.

Next day, with the strut of a conqueror and with pride shining from every freckle, little Peter Mullaney entered the police training school.

To fit himself physically for the task of being a limb of the law, he oned, twoed, threed and bent by the hour, twisted the toes of two hundred pound fellow students in frantic jiu jitsu, and lugged other ponderous probationers about on his shoulders in the practice of first aid to the injured. This physical side of his schooling Peter enjoyed, and, despite his lack of inches, did extremely well, for he was quick, tough and determined. But it was the book-work that made him pucker his brow and press his head with his hands as if to keep it from bursting with the facts he had to jam into it.

It was the boast of Commissioner Kondorman that he was making his police force the most intelligent in the world. Give him time, he was fond of saying, and there would not be a man on it who could not be called well-informed. He intended to see to it that from chief inspector down to the greenest patrolman they could answer, off-hand, not only questions about routine police matters, but about the whole range of the encyclopedia.

"I want well-informed men, intelligent men," he said. "Men who can tell you the capital of Patagonia, where copra comes from, and who discovered the cotton-gin. I want men who have used their brains, have read and thought a bit. The only way I can find that out is by asking questions, isn't it?"

The anti-administration press, with intent to slight, called the policemen "Kondorman's Encyclopedias bound in blue," but he was not in the least perturbed; he made his next examination a bit stiffer.

Peter Mullaney, handicapped by the fact that his span of elementary schooling had been abbreviated by the necessity of earning his own living, struggled valiantly with weighty tomes packed with statutes, ordinances, and regulations--what a police officer can and cannot do about mayhem, snow on the sidewalks, arson, dead horses in the street, kidnaping, extricating intoxicated gentlemen from man-holes, smoking automobiles, stray goats, fires, earthquakes, lost children, blizzards, disorderly conduct and riots. He prepared himself, by no small exertion, to tell an inquiring public where Bedford street is, if traffic can go both ways on Commerce street, what car to take to get from Hudson street to Chatham Square, how to get to the nearest branch library, quick lunch, public bath, zoo, dispensary and garage, how to get to the Old Slip Station, Flower Hospital, the St. Regis, Coney Island, Duluth and Grant's Tomb. He stuffed himself with these pertinent facts; he wanted to be a good cop. He could not see exactly how it would help him to know in addition to an appalling amount of local geography and history, the name of the present ruler of Bulgaria, what a zebu is, and who wrote "Home, Sweet Home." But since questions of this sort were quite sure to bob up on the examination he toiled through many volumes with a zeal that made his head ache.