Mills grunted approval. "Good scheme," he assented. "We'll be a regular trust. But when you say, 'resources, such as they are,' you've put your finger on our weakest spot. If we have resources, they're not in cash. What shall we call ourselves? 'The United Brotherhood of Down and Outs'? Or is that too severe?"
But Blagden, the imaginative, suddenly caught fire at the idea. "No, no," he objected, "nothing as crude as that. Give a dog a bad name and hang him. I'll tell you what we'll call ourselves. 'Gentlemen Adventurers.' That has the proper ring. Every morning we'll start forth on a tour of discovery; then we'll meet and compare notes and see if we can't combine our experiences to our mutual advantage."
"That sounds fine," Mills agreed, "but what kind of adventures are we going to have?"
"Oh, Tubby, Tubby," cried Blagden. "If there's a more prosaic man in the world than you are, I'd like to see him. Why, you miss the point of the whole thing. If we knew just what was going to happen to us, every day of our lives, where would the fun be? Where would be the romance, the thrill? If you could see an adventure coming half a mile down the road, then it wouldn't be an adventure; it has to bump into you from right around the corner. Do you get the idea?"
"Oh, sure," retorted Mills. "At least, I get what you think is the idea. But that is the trouble with you poetical chaps; you can't understand that this is a practical world, especially the dollars and cents part of it. And if you're proposing that we leave here to-night and start looking for adventure, why we'd better raise an emergency fund at once. Because instead of finding money, we'll be losing it. I've started looking for adventure lots of times in my life, and I always bring up in one of two places--the police station or the hospital."
"Oh, I don't mean that kind of adventure," Blagden hastened to explain. "I mean the 'New Arabian Nights' sort of thing. We'll meet princesses and potentates and you may take my word for it that it won't be long before we're on the trail of some real money. We'll get back all we've lost and more too."
He spoke persuasively, but Mills remained unconvinced. "Oh, it's easy enough," he objected, "to talk like that in here, with the lights and the music and a couple of glasses of champagne under your belt. But nothing will really happen. We'll go out of this place and walk peacefully home again, and in the morning we'll wake up and laugh at ourselves. I only wish your dreams would come true, Blagden, but they won't; they're all moonshine. The only real thing is that we're broke."
But Blagden, always at his best under fire, rallied vigorously to the support of his theory. "Nonsense," he cried, "you ought to be ashamed of yourself. One minute you claim to be a fighter and the next you're ready to quit cold. Why, the trouble with you--the trouble with all three of us--and the reason we think there's no romance left in the world is simply that we've gone stale--stale from sitting over the ticker day after day, without a thought of anything else on earth except the ups and downs of the market. I would gamble my last cent that there's waiting for us, right here in this city, adventure enough to fill a thousand books; adventures of riches and of poverty, of romance and reality, of battle and murder and sudden death. Here's the test. What day is this? Tuesday. Friday night, at nine o'clock, we'll meet in my rooms and compare notes. We'll all three try our best in the meantime and if by Friday no one of us has had an adventure worthy of the name, no one of us has chanced on the slightest idea, the faintest clue, that spells money, then I'll admit that I'm wrong and that Tubby's right. Now then, you fat guzzler, isn't that fair?"
"Oh, sure, that's fair enough," Mills was forced to agree, "but I don't believe--"
He stopped abruptly, gazing straight before him, and then, under his breath, he murmured, "Great Heavens, what a peach!"