If looks could kill, Toomey would have died standing. But he continued emphatically:
“The salvation of Prouty is water. By water I mean the completion of the irrigation project. Gentlemen—I am here to state unreservedly that I can put that enterprise through, providing the stockholders will give me an option upon fifty-one per cent. of the stock. I must have the controlling interest.”
Could he have an option? Could he! Only the restraining hand of a neighbor upon his coat tail prevented Walt Scales from hurdling the intervening chairs to reach Toomey to thrust his shares upon him. Hope and skepticism of the genuineness of his assertions commingled in the faces upon which Toomey looked, while he waited for an answer. He saw the doubt and took Prentiss’s letter from his pocket. Shaking it at them, he declared impressively:
“This communication is from a party I have interested—an old friend of mine of wealth and standing, who will finance the project providing it is as represented, and under the condition I have just mentioned.” Toomey himself so thoroughly believed what he said that he carried conviction, although nowadays his veracity under oath would have been questioned.
The prospect of unloading his stock made Hiram Butefish as thirsty as if he had eaten herring, and, overlooking the glass in his excitement, he drank long and deep from the water pitcher before he said tremulously:
“Undoubtedly that can be arranged, Mr. Toomey.”
It was obvious that the Boosters Club shared its president’s opinion. Each quivered with an eagerness to get at Toomey which was not unlike that of a race horse fretting to be first over the starting line. They crowded around him when the meeting was ended, offering their congratulations and their stock to him, but taking care to avoid any mention of the various sums that he owed each and all.
As for Toomey, it was like the old days when his appearance upon the streets of Prouty was an event, when they called him “Mister” and touched their hat-brims to him, when he could get a hearing without blocking the exit.
He left the Boosters Club with his pulses bounding with pride and importance. He had “come back”—as a man must who has imagination and initiative. They could “watch his smoke,” could Prouty.
There was not a member present who did not reach his home panting, to shake his wife out of her slumbers to tell her that, at last, Toomey had “got into something.”