“Why, this is dramatic—yes!”
“It is half-past two. Between this and four o'clock I must buy a few hundred acres in Australia, a fair bargain.”
“Humph! Well, that can be done. I know an old fellow that has land in every part of the globe.”
“Take me to him.”
In ten minutes they were in one of those dingy, narrow alleys in the city of London, that look the abode of decent poverty, and they could afford to buy Grosvenor Square for their stables; and Mr. Clinton introduced his friend to a blear-eyed merchant in a large room papered with maps; the windows were incrusted; mustard and cress might have been grown from them. Beauty in clean linen collar and wristbands would have shown here with intolerable luster; but the blear-eyed merchant did not come out bright by contrast; he had taken the local color. You could see him and that was all. He was like a partridge in a furrow. A snuff-colored man; coat rusty all but the collar, and that greasy; poor as its color was, his linen had thought it worth emulating; blackish nails, cotton wipe, little bald place on head, but didn't shine for the same reason the windows didn't. Mr. Clinton approached this “dhirrrty money,” this rusty coin, in the spirit of flunkyish.
“Sir,” said he, in a low reverential tone, “this party is disposed to purchase a few hundred acres in the colonies.”
Mr. Rich looked up from his desk and pointed with a sweep of his pen to the walls.
“There are the maps; the red crosses are my land. They are numbered. Refer to the margin of map, and you will find the acres and the latitude and longitude calculated to a fraction. When you have settled in what part of the world you buy, come to me again; time is gold.”
And the blear-eyed merchant wrote and sealed and filed and took no notice of his customers. They found red crosses in several of the United States, in Canada, in Borneo, in nearly all the colonies, and as luck would have it they found one small cross within thirty miles of Bathurst, and the margin described it as five hundred acres. Mr. Meadows stepped toward the desk.
“I have found a small property near Bathurst.”