"When this option runs out I get another at the same price--and twice more after that."

"Nonsense!" exclaimed Gresham, turning away. "Why, I'd be letting you tie up my property for four months."

"I'm offering you over eighty per cent, a year. You'd rather stay tied."

Gresham pondered that problem for a moment.

"By Jove, you're right!" he said. "I'm selfish enough to hope that you can't pay for it in thirty days." He reflected that in all probability this reckless person was playing another long shot. "I'll take you."

Gamble piled the money into his hands, and with Polly's fountain-pen, wrote a clear and concise statement of the option upon the back of an unimportant letter. Gresham, as soon as he had finished counting the money with caressing fingers, read and reread the option cautiously--and signed it.

Polly reached out for it.

"Let me witness this," she requested with a glance of meaning at her friend Johnny; and, writing the word "Witnesses" in its proper place, she signed her name and pa.s.sed the paper to Miss Joy. "Come in, Constance; the water's fine," she invited. "Be a witness with me and let's all be in vulgar trade."

Constance signed the paper gravely, puckering her lips adorably as she made a careful business of it. She gave the paper to Mr. Gamble, and he felt foolish enough to kiss the signature. She found another paper upon her lap and opened it mechanically. It was the subscription list.

Suddenly she burst into laughter.

"This last donation is from Angora!" she exclaimed. "That's a generous subscription, Mr. Gamble; but I don't know whether to thank you or the horse."

"Thank the goat, whoever that is," he suggested, smiling into her eyes.

Great Scott, what eyes they were! "Polly, Colonel Bouncer is over there by the band stand. I'll give you a nickel's worth of peanuts if you'll tell him what I'm doing."

Mr. Gresham turned olive green.

"Wait a minute, Miss Parsons," he protested. "Mr. Gamble, you manage very nicely without Mr. Collaton. If you knew of a probable purchaser for my property you have just taken a most unethical advantage of me."

"You didn't have your fingers crossed," Gamble serenely reminded him.

"Not once," corroborated Polly. "I watched him all the time. Just leave the colonel to me, Johnny. I'll scare him to death on the way here,"

and she hurried away upon her errand.

"I suppose I must take my medicine," said Gresham glumly. "I should have sent you to my lawyer. I might have known that your business ethics and my own would be entirely different."

"What are business ethics, Mr. Gresham?" asked Constance with suspicious innocence.

"There do not seem to be any," he responded.

"I never heard of any," agreed Gamble cheerfully. "My principle is, See it first and grab it."

"That's the rule of every highwayman, I believe," charged Gresham. "You will excuse me for a few moments, please?" And he hurried away in pursuit of a man whom he had seen pa.s.sing.

"That's the rule of life," said Gamble. "I had to learn it quick. It took me four months to save up my first eighteen dollars. I thought I'd never get it."

"You must have wanted something very much," suggested Constance, smiling sympathetically at her vision of this man as a boy, h.o.a.rding his pennies and nickels like a miser for so long a time.

"I did," he admitted simply. "I wanted a cook stove with silver k.n.o.bs.

The day I had it brought home was the proudest of my life. My mother knelt down and hugged it. It had four lids and not one of them was cracked."

Constance looked at him with a musing smile. He must have been a handsome boy.

CHAPTER IV

IN WHICH GRESHAM FINDS JOHNNY'S OLD PARTNER ACCOMMODATING

Beneath the grandstand, Gresham caught up with a thin-faced and sandy-haired man whose colorless eyebrows and almost colorless eyes gave his waxlike countenance a peculiarly blank expression--much as if one had drawn a face and had forgotten to mark in the features. The man started nervously as Gresham touched him on the shoulder, and his thin lips parted in a frightened snarl.

"You have such a ghastly way of slipping up behind one," he complained, brushing the shoulder upon which Gresham had laid his hand.

"You're nervous, Collaton. I'm not Johnny Gamble," laughed Gresham.

"Suppose you were!" indignantly retorted Collaton. "I'm not avoiding Johnny." And he studied Gresham furtively.

"The Gamble-Collaton books are. Do you imagine there are any more outstanding accounts against your firm?"

"How should I know?" Collaton glanced about him uneasily.

"True enough--how should you?" agreed Gresham soothingly. "I'd feel rather sorry for Gamble if an old and forgotten note against your firm, upon which a judgment had been quietly secured 'by default', should turn up just now."

"I don't think one will," returned Collaton, searching Gresham's eyes.

"Why?"

"Because he is almost certain to make a deposit in the Fourth National Bank in a short time."

"That's a very good reason," laughed Collaton, now certain of the eyes.

"If that deposit were to be attached," went on Gresham suavely, "it might embarra.s.s him very much." There was a slight pause. "If you'll call me up to-night I'll let you know how much it will be and when he is likely to bank it."

"Why do you tell me this?" puzzled Collaton.

"Because I want him broke!" explained Gresham, his face suddenly twitching viciously in spite of himself.

Collaton thought it over carefully.

"What's your telephone number?" he accommodatingly inquired.

Colonel Bouncer, meanwhile, was flattered to have Polly Parsons pause at his seat as she came down the aisle, after an extended pa.s.sage at arms with Val Russel, and tell him how young he looked.

"Gad, you'd make any man feel young and brisk!" he gallantly declared.

"Wasn't that Paul Gresham in Mrs. Boyden's box?"

"Yes; the very Paul," she a.s.sured him, glad that the colonel was making it so easy for her. "He's going to give you a new neighbor, Colonel.

He's just been discussing a deal with Mr. Gamble for the vacant property next to your factory."