"Sure you would." Cummings leaned back. I saw he considered his point made. "Whipple would rather take their own bank stock than anything else. Your father has just acquired a big block of it. Act while there's time. Better go out there and see him now—at once."
"I'll think about it," Worth nodded. "You dig for me what you can and never quit." And he applied himself to the demands of the down-town traffic.
"Well," Cummings said, "drop me at the next corner, please. I've got an engagement with a man here."
Worth swung in and stopped. Cummings left us. As we began to worm a slow way toward my office, I suggested,
"You'll come upstairs with me, and—er—sort of outline a policy? I ought to have any possible information you can give me, so's not to make any more wrong moves than we have to."
"Information?" he echoed, and I hastened to amend,
"I mean whatever notion you've got. Your theory, you know—"
"Not a notion. Not a theory." He shook his head, eyes on the traffic cop. "That's your part."
I sat there somewhat flabbergasted. After all, I hadn't fully believed that the boy had absolutely nothing to go on, that he had bought purely at a whim, put up eight hundred thousand dollars on my skill at running down a criminal. It sort of crumpled me up. I said so. He laughed a little, ran up to the curb at the Phelan building, cut out the engine, set the brake and turned to me with,
"Don't worry. I'm getting what I paid for—or what I'm going to pay for. And I've got to go right after the money. Suppose I meet you, say, at ten o'clock to-night?"