CHAPTER XIX
In the course of his financial peregrinations amongst the highways and byways of the city, Mr. Dane Montague made many acquaintances. It chanced that soon after the exploitation of the Shoreditch Empress Music Hall, a flotation which brought Mr. Montague many admirers from the underworlds of finance, it fell to his lot to give a luncheon party to celebrate the culmination of a subsidiary financial swindle and to plan further activities in the same direction. His guests were Philip Mason, the well-known man about town, and Joe Hartwell, the trans-atlantic young adventurer. After the third bottle of champagne, it transpired that the luncheon party had a further object.
“It’s queer that you should have run across the little beast, too,” Mr. Dane Montague observed. “Got it laid by for him, haven’t you?”
Mason’s good-looking but dissipated face was suddenly ugly.
“If I could wring his neck,” he muttered, “I’d do it to-morrow and thank my stars.”
“He’ll get his some day from this guy,” Joe Hartwell added earnestly. “I’m kind of hanging round for the chance.”
Mr. Montague ordered expensive cigars and the three men’s heads drew a little closer together.
“We ought to be able to put it across him,” the host continued. “We’ve brains enough, and between us we know the ropes. The only thing is that it’s pretty difficult to hurt him financially. I believe it’s a fact that he’s well on towards his second million.”
“There are other ways,” Hartwell remarked, draining his glass with slow, unwholesome deliberation. “If I’d got him in New York I should know what to do. I guess there are back doors in this little village.”
“Here’s one of the clan!” Montague exclaimed, looking up. “Sit down and have a drink with us, Felixstowe.”