"Jim," he said in a different tone, "you and all your family have always protested yourselves under great obligations to me."
He paused as if for a reply.
"You know what we feel for you!" Vanbigh replied warmly. He lifted earnest eyes as he spoke.
For Gorham had been a schoolfellow of Vanbigh's elder brother, and although later in life they had drifted apart in point of association, there had always been that affectionate tie of old reminiscence between them. Only some two or three years earlier than the present they had chanced to meet in New Orleans, where they were lingering still at the time of the outbreak of one of the terrible pestilences of yellow fever. Gorham, when his friend succumbed, one of the first cases, nursed him like a brother, would not leave him, although he could then have escaped in the general panic-stricken exodus, never left him, indeed, for an instant, and after his death, being detained by the quarantine, contracted the infection and came very near death himself, alone and among strangers. People said that it was a mere impulse of Gorham's,—but the relatives of his friend felt and expressed great gratitude. He himself had never before mentioned it.
"I know what you all said," he remarked significantly. "I never doubted it before." He would have paid "good money" to an actor who could command a tone of so subtle an inflection as to make such a hit as that!
The broker rose and put on his hat.
"I shall not let you doubt it again!" he protested.
"You are a good fellow, Jim!" cried Gorham, with great satisfaction in carrying his point.
"But it must be understood that I cannot undertake to act for you, under the circumstances; if the boy takes flight I lose the money myself," Vanbigh resumed.
He was thinking himself justified in this after all. He could have the boy kept under surveillance without his knowledge, and at the first suspicious intimation of flight his bondsmen could surrender him. Vanbigh felt that he could hardly refuse Gorham aught in reason, and believing the boy innocent of the crime Gorham had evidently set his heart on bail for him. "But where am I to find another bondsman?" the broker exclaimed, realizing that these considerations would scarcely have weight with any other person. "The law, as you know, requires two sureties on the bond."