It was his custom to time his visit to the restaurant so as to dine before the crowd of customers came for their evening meal. To-night, however, he was behind them. The place was no fuller than he usually found it, but it bore signs of the recent crush. The cloth of the table was crumpled and soiled, the glass in which the inevitable ice-water was poured was yet warm from being washed, while the evening paper the waiter gave him was adorned with an irregular stain of coffee. In the midst of the brown blotch of this stain was a patch undiscolored; and by one of those odd and improbable coincidences of which life is full, in the midst of this spot of dingy white Barum West once more caught sight of his own name. The whimsical fate which had started the fantastic train of thought in his mind ten days before now finished its work by a paragraph stating that the will by which $200,000 had been bequeathed to Barum West by Richard Granger, of Chicago, was now found to antedate a second testament by which the money was left to Harvard College.
Barum West went home with the light step of a boy. A great responsibility seemed suddenly lifted from his shoulders. The capricious fancy which had insisted that he should be depressed because he had lost an imaginary fortune had apparently been willing to accept the fact that even in hypothesis the possession of the money had been a mistake, and the unlucky speculator was formally acquitted at the bar of his inner consciousness. He lit his lamp and his pipe, seated himself in his chintz-covered rocking-chair, with his heels on the top of the coal stove, and ruminated. He reflected upon the fact that it was only five days before he was to meet the manager, and nothing was done in the way of a play which he could for an instant regard as at all satisfactory.
“Instead of writing an extravaganza,” he thought, with mingled amusement and self-reproach, “I have been living one.”
The form of the thought struck him instantly. His feet came down to the floor with a crash, and in his excitement his pipe went smashing down beside them.
“By Jove!” he cried aloud, “I have it!”
And the plot of the extravaganza, which everybody will remember as being so successful the following winter, “A Speculator in Air,” and which set Barum West on his feet financially, was only a properly modified version of the vagaries in which the author had indulged in the handling and the losing of his imaginary fortune.