"Yes, I know."
"Do you? How much?" His voice was hard and dry; it didn't sound good to me.
"See here," I put it to him, as my clever little driver dodged in and out through the narrow lanes between Pagoda-like shops of Chinatown, avoiding the steep hill streets by a diagonal through the Italian quarter on Columbus Avenue. "If there's anything you think I ought to be told, put me wise. I suppose you raised that money for Worth—the seventy-two thousand that was lacking, I mean?"
"I did not."
I turned the situation over and over in my mind, and at last asked cautiously,
"Worth did get the money to make up the full amount, didn't he?"
We had swerved again to the north, where the Powell car-line curves into Bay Street, and were headed direct for the wharves. Cummings watched me out of the corners of his eyes, a look that bored in most unpleasantly, while he cross-examined,
"So you don't know where he raised that money—or how—or when? You don't even know that he did raise it? Is that the idea?"
I gave him look for look, but no answer. An indecisive slackening of the machine, and Little Pete asked,
"Where now, sir?"