“I can’t!”
“Why not?”
“I haven’t the courage.”
“Then we’ve got to get it,” I insisted. “I’m ready to face the music, if you are. So let’s get right down to hard-pan. Have they—have they really cleaned you out?”
“To the last dollar,” he replied, without looking up.
“What did it?” I asked, remaining stubbornly and persistently ox-like in my placidity.
“No one thing did it, Chaddie, except that I tried to bite off too much. And for the last two years, of course, the boom’s been flattening out. If our Associated Land Corporation hadn’t gone under—”
“Then it has gone under?” I interrupted, with a catch of the breath, for I knew just how much had been staked on that venture.
Dinky-Dunk nodded his head. “And carried me with it,” he grimly announced. “But even that wouldn’t have meant a knock-out, if the government had only kept its promise and taken over my Vancouver Island water-front.”
That, I remembered, was to have been some sort of a shipyard. Then I remembered something else.