Mr Rochborne thought fleetingly of the mayhem he was going to perform upon the luckless frame of Reuben Innowitz when he caught him.
“Very well,” he groaned. “I’ll write you a check.”
“My swami told me all deals should be in cash,” said Mrs Phelan brightly. “I’ll get the stock and go with you to the bank.”
An hour later, minus practically his entire bank roll but grimly triumphant, with the stock of the Lucky Nugget mine in his pocket, Mr Melville Rochborne met Mr Reuben Innowitz on the doorstep of the apartment house on Russian Hill, and finally achieved a much-needed self-expression.
“You stupid worthless jerk!” he exploded. “What’s the idea of being out all day — and on a day like this? You just cost us twenty-five grand!”
“Listen,” shrilled the prophet, “who’s calling who a jerk! What did you do about that mine?”
“I got it back, of course,” Rochborne told him short-windedly. “Even though the old bag took me for twenty-five G’s more than she put into it — just because you weren’t around to cool her down. But I didn’t dare take a chance on waiting. There were some old-time prospectors around, and if any of them recognized the carnotite—”
“The what?” Innowitz said.
“Carnotite — that’s what uranium comes from. The Lucky Nugget is full of it. You know what that’s worth today. If any of those miners spotted it and the story was in the papers tomorrow morning, you couldn’t buy that stock for a million dollars... It was the Saint, of course,” Mr Rochborne explained, becoming even more incoherent, “and he was trying to put over the most amateurish job of mine-salting I ever saw, but when he reads about this—”
The swami was staring at him in a most unspiritual way.