“Colonel!  Indeed it does take one’s breath away.”

“Now do you see the money that’s in it?”

“I’m—­well, I’m—­not really sure that I do.”

Great Scott, look here.  I shall have a monopoly; they’ll all belong to me, won’t they?  Two thousand policemen in the city of New York.  Wages, four dollars a day.  I’ll replace them with dead ones at half the money.

“Oh, prodigious!  I never thought of that.  F-o-u-r thousand dollars a day.  Now I do begin to see!  But will dead policemen answer?”

“Haven’t they—­up to this time?”

“Well, if you put it that way—­”

“Put it any way you want to.  Modify it to suit yourself, and my lads shall still be superior.  They won’t eat, they won’t drink—­don’t need those things; they won’t wink for cash at gambling dens and unlicensed rum-holes, they won’t spark the scullery maids; and moreover the bands of toughs that ambuscade them on lonely beats, and cowardly shoot and knife them will only damage the uniforms and not live long enough to get more than a momentary satisfaction out of that.”

“Why, Colonel, if you can furnish policemen, then of course—­”

“Certainly—­I can furnish any line of goods that’s wanted.  Take the army, for instance—­now twenty-five thousand men; expense, twenty-two millions a year.  I will dig up the Romans, I will resurrect the Greeks, I will furnish the government, for ten millions a year, ten thousand veterans drawn from the victorious legions of all the ages—­soldiers that will chase Indians year in and year out on materialized horses, and cost never a cent for rations or repairs.  The armies of Europe cost two billions a year now—­I will replace them all for a billion.  I will dig up the trained statesmen of all ages and all climes, and furnish this country with a Congress that knows enough to come in out of the rain—­ a thing that’s never happened yet, since the Declaration of Independence, and never will happen till these practically dead people are replaced with the genuine article.  I will restock the thrones of Europe with the best brains and the best morals that all the royal sepulchres of all the centuries can furnish—­which isn’t promising very much—­and I’ll divide the wages and the civil list, fair and square, merely taking my half and—­”

“Colonel, if the half of this is true, there’s millions in it—­millions.”

“Billions in it—­billions; that’s what you mean.  Why, look here; the thing is so close at hand, so imminent, so absolutely immediate, that if a man were to come to me now and say, Colonel, I am a little short, and if you could lend me a couple of billion dollars for—­come in!”

This in answer to a knock.  An energetic looking man bustled in with a big pocket-book in his hand, took a paper from it and presented it, with the curt remark: 

“Seventeenth and last call—­you want to out with that three dollars and forty cents this time without fail, Colonel Mulberry Sellers.”