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Long experimentation had shown him that the minimum of sleep he could get along with to advantage was six and one-half hours nightly. This meant bed at 1.30 exactly, and he hardly varied it five minutes in a year. To his marrow he was systematic; he was as definite as an adding-machine, as practical as a cash register. But even now, on this exceptional night, he did not go straight to bed.
He was wondering if he ought to confide this to Saunders, when his partner, of his own accord, came into his office and sat down by his desk. "Busy just now?" Saunders inquired. "No; what is it?" Mostyn returned. "Fire away." Saunders seemed to hesitate. Through the partition came the clicking of a typewriter and an adding-machine, the swinging of the screened door in front.
All that detail of range-finding and mathematical adjustment of aim at the unseen target which takes so long to explain was applied as automatically as an adding-machine adds up a column of figures. Everybody was as practice-perfect in his part as performers who have made hundreds of appearances in the same act on the stage.
In faro it is customary for the case-keeper to sit on the opposite side of the table from the dealer, with a device before him resembling an abacus, or Chinese adding-machine.
But Jerry asked him and he didn't, so Jerry gave him a line about being a whiz at arithmetic and said he bet Carl could say right off how much money you'd have left if you subtracted eight dollars and twenty-one cents from ten dollars. For a few seconds Jerry saw a human adding-machine at work. Then Carl said, "One dollar and seventy-nine cents, of course."
If a man owns a cash-register or an adding-machine, it never occurs to him to wonder how, or of what, it is made. But let him buy an automobile, and ten minutes after it is in his possession he wants to know "what is inside." He is like a boy with his first watch. Hence the automobile-purchaser knows all about his car, and when he buys a second one it is impossible to fool him.
Repeatedly she must add and re-add a column of figures; even the evidence of the adding-machine had to be proven. She wakened at night questioning the correctness of her entries, and her work became slow and inaccurate. All she did, physically and mentally, became a dread. The very act of walking to and from the bank seemed to drain her waning strength.
"Poor old chap!" he said. "The shame of his lack of judgment is killing him." Just then the door of Mostyn's office opened, and Mostyn himself came out. He paused over an electric adding-machine which was being manipulated by a clerk, gave it an idle glance, and then came on to his partner. "Albert says old Henderson was here talking to you," he said, coldly. "I suppose it's the old complaint?"
Nothing was the trouble. Except with old Goglefogle. I made one little break in my accounts. Why, if old Gogie had to keep track of seventy-'leven accounts and watch every single last movement of a fool girl that can't even run the adding-machine, why, he'd get green around the gills. He'd never do anything but make mistakes! Well, I guess the old codger must have had a bum breakfast this morning.
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