“Walter,” he said quietly—a bit too quietly—“ there isn’t any dross. ”
I just looked at him stupidly, and he must have decided he’d said more than he wanted to, because he started hurrying the papers he’d just folded out into the office, and he said, “See you later, Walter. I got to take these—”
The fact that my daughter-in-law had a narrow escape from pneumonia in a town several hundred miles away has nothing to do with the affair of Ronson’s Linotype, except that it accounts for my being away three weeks. I didn’t see George for that length of time.
I got two frantic telegrams from him during the third week of my absence; neither gave any details except that he wanted me to hurry back. In the second one, he ended up: “HURRY. MONEY NO OBJECT. TAKE PLANE.”
And he’d wired an order for a hundred dollars with the message. I puzzled over that one. “Money no object,” is a strange phrase from the editor of a country newspaper. And I hadn’t known George to have a hundred dollars cash in one lump since I’d known him, which had been a good many years.
But family ties come first, and I wired back that I’d return the instant Ella was out of danger and not a minute sooner, and that I wasn’t cashing the money order because plane fare was only ten dollars, anyway; and I didn’t need money.
Two days later everything was okay, and I wired him when I’d get there. He met me at the airport.
He looked older and worn to a frazzle, and his eyes looked like he hadn’t slept for days. But he had on a new suit and he drove a new car that shrieked money by the very silence of its engine.
He said, “Thank God you’re back, Walter—I’ll pay you any price you want to—”
“Hey,” I said, “slow down; you’re talking so fast you don’t make sense. Now start over and take it easy. What’s the trouble?”