After Eulas Daly had gone, Hammond kept turning the name over and over in his mind: Gildersleeve—Norman T. Gildersleeve? Where had he read or heard that name before? Somehow it seemed connected with big business and stock market reports. Ten to one he was looking for a private secretary, a biographer or a publicity agent. Well, any one of those things wouldn’t be so bad, and it would be a change from the exacting grind of the daily newspaper where one was always behind the scenes of big things in process, but never, never quite a part of them. Hammond was twenty-five, the age of limitless discontent, alone in the world and intensely ambitious.
But he was far from guessing the extraordinary nature of the proposition that was about to be put up to him.
II
“Mr. Gildersleeve wishes to see you alone in his stateroom.”
Hammond noted that much of the previous enthusiasm had gone from the little consul’s manner. His tone now was businesslike, matter-of-fact. No doubt, conjectured Hammond, he had hoped to be a party to the interview he had been instrumental in bringing about.
At the door of Gildersleeve’s stateroom, Hammond shook the hand of Eulas Daly with a word of thanks for the interest he had volunteered in the matter. “I’ll see you later and tell you all about it,” he said, a promise, which, for unexpected reasons, he never kept.
Hammond found Gildersleeve with a litter of papers and documents scattered about him and more protruding from the open jaws of a travelling-bag. He was the cut of a typical captain of big business; middle-aged, iron-grey, with a keen, cold face and the drift of a busy career stamped all over his personality. Two tiny spots, livid white, one below either eye, lent rather a sinister tone to his face, especially when his brilliant dark eyes, set too close to the hawklike nose, were looking straight at you. At first glance, those two marks appeared to be birth-marks, but closer scrutiny disclosed them to be scars.
He did not offer his hand at first; just favoured the younger man with a glance that was as swift as it was penetrating, then turned the document on the little leaf-table before him face down and motioned his visitor to a seat. When he spoke, Hammond felt an electric urge to be brief and to the point.
“Mr. Daly has told me what he knows of you,” he opened. “Now, will you kindly oblige me with such detail as you think important about yourself and your capabilities?”
Hammond’s training had disciplined him in the terse use of language. He told it all in less than ten minutes’ time.