“I can't let you have any more,” he repeated. “I can't!” And down came his fist in a weak-violent gesture.
I leaned forward and laid my hand strongly on his arm.
“In addition to the stock of this concern that I hold in my own name,” said I, “I hold five shares in the name of a man whom nobody knows that I even know. If you don't let me have the money, that man goes to the district attorney with information that lands you in the penitentiary, that puts your company out of business and into bankruptcy before to-morrow noon. I saved you three years ago, and got you this job against just such an emergency as this, Bob Corey. And, by God, you'll toe the mark!”
“But we haven't done anything that every bank in town doesn't do every day—doesn't have to do. If we didn't lend money to dummy borrowers and over-certify accounts, our customers would go where they could get accommodations.”
“That's true enough,” said I. “But I'm in a position for the moment where I need my friends—and they've got to come to time. If I don't get the money from you, I'll get it elsewhere—but over the cliff with you and your bank! The laws you've been violating may be bad for the practical banking business, but they're mighty good for punishing ingratitude and treachery.”
He sat there, yellow and pinched, and shivering every now and then. He made no reply. He was one of those shells of men that are conspicuous as figureheads in every department of active life—fellows with well-shaped, white-haired or prematurely bald heads, and grave, respectable faces; they look dignified and substantial, and the soul of uprightness; they coin their looks into good salaries by selling themselves as covers for operations of the financiers. And how those operations, in the nude, as it were, would terrify the plodders that save up and deposit or invest the money the financiers gamble with on the big green tables!
Presently I shook his arm impatiently. His eyes met mine, and I fixed them.
“I'm going to pull through,” said I. “But if I weren't, I'd see to it that you were protected. Come, what's your answer? Friend or traitor?”
“Can't you give me any security—any collateral?”
“No more than I took from you when I saved you as you were going down with the rest in the Dumont smash. My word—that's all. I borrow on the same terms you've given me before, the same you're giving four of your heaviest borrowers right now.”