"That's what he told me. Seems I'd given these Bedros people a check for sixty for that last case of liquor—and I only had forty-five dollars in the bank. Well, the Bedros people deposited fifteen dollars to my account and drew the whole thing out."
In her ignorance Gloria conjured up a spectre of imprisonment and disgrace.
"Oh, they won't do anything," he assured her. "Bootlegging's too risky a business. They'll send me a bill for fifteen dollars and I'll pay it."
"Oh." She considered a moment. "—Well, we can sell another bond."
He laughed sarcastically.
"Oh, yes, that's always easy. When the few bonds we have that are paying any interest at all are only worth between fifty and eighty cents on the dollar. We lose about half the bond every time we sell."
"What else can we do?"
"Oh, we'll sell something—as usual. We've got paper worth eighty thousand dollars at par." Again he laughed unpleasantly. "Bring about thirty thousand on the open market."
"I distrusted those ten per cent investments."
"The deuce you did!" he said. "You pretended you did, so you could claw at me if they went to pieces, but you wanted to take a chance as much as I did."