By herculean efforts, the arrest of Jim Phillips was kept as a close secret. Bromlow, despite his conviction, which was honest enough, that Jim was guilty, dared not oppose Brady too far, and was willing enough that the matter should be kept quiet, moreover, for the sake of the bank itself. But one of the few persons who heard about the arrest was Barrows, who chuckled grimly. He expected that Dick Merriwell would also be involved, and he felt that he could already spend the extra five thousand dollars that Phelps had promised him.
“We’re not getting as much as we expected out of this,” he said to Bascom. “But we can go back for the rest later. And, in the meantime, Riggs is all right, still in the bank, and still able to serve us if we want him again. Merriwell and Phillips are in a hole they’ll never be able to crawl out of, and we’ve got ten thousand dollars.”
“Are you sure this money we’ve got is all right?” asked Bascom. “I understand, of course, that the bank hasn’t got the numbers of the real notes, but how about Merriwell himself? He may have the numbers?”
“Wouldn’t he have said so, to clear himself long before this?” asked Barrows. “The thing has worked out better than I thought was possible. That was why I took the chance of getting that money back to Riggs. Otherwise, I’d have let him go, and made a quick jump out of here after getting what I could for these notes. It’s a good thing our plan didn’t work out, really. We’re better off than we expected to be.”
Barrows, complacent and self-satisfied, enjoyed his triumph over Harding to the full. He strutted around the other gambler’s haunts, making a lavish display of his money, and spending it liberally. His old friends, who had shown signs of deserting him after the disaster that had overtaken him in New London, returned at once, and Harding felt himself discredited and ridiculous in the eyes of his friends. Barrows had turned the tables neatly.
Even some of the politicians who backed Harding were inclined to laugh at him.
“You seem to have raised a husky chap in this fellow Barrows,” said one of them. “Poor work, Bill. You saved him from going under a year ago—and now he’s making you look foolish. There’s nothing on him now.”
“If there is, let them do what they like to him,” growled Harding. “He’s too fresh. He thinks he’s the whole cheese now, just because he’s managed to get a stake. I bet there’s something crooked about the way he got it, too. Give the bulls the tip to soak him if they get a chance, will you?”
“Sure thing,” said the politician. “He’s nothing to me. But I guess he’s got his tracks pretty well covered.”
“He hasn’t got sense enough,” said Harding. “He was up against it hard after that break he made at New London, and he took any way he could to make a stake.”