David, untried enough to feel that any sharing of the dreadful thing would be a relief, hesitated no longer. The secret would be published broadcast in a day or two at most, so nothing mattered much. In a few words he told the story of the threatening catastrophe, exaggerating nothing, minimizing nothing. Eben Grillage heard him through without interrupting, shifting the chewed cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other as he listened. But at the end of the story he was scowling ferociously.
“Your father is still the same kind of a tender-hearted fool that he has always been!” he rapped out. “Sat through an hour-and-a-half dinner with me—dammit!—and never once opened his head about this bog hole he’s mired in!” Then he dragged out the biscuit-like watch. “We’ve got barely fifteen minutes, young man. You go and get Judson, the scrapers-and-dump-car man, on the ’phone, while I do a bit of figuring. Jump for it!”
David Vallory obeyed blindly, with his brain in a whirl. It took several of the hastening minutes to locate Judson at his home in the northern suburb, and when the telephone connection was finally made, the hotel porter was calling the Chicago train and Eben Grillage was at the desk, paying his bill and growling out orders about his hand-baggage. A moment later David had handed the telephone receiver to the big-bodied man and was listening mechanically to the audible half of the conversation which began with shot-like directness.
“Yes, this is Grillage.... No, I don’t want to talk about the shipment; I want to know where you do your banking.... With the Middleboro National, you say? Well, this time you’ll do it through my bank—the Middleboro Security. Get that? Attach your draft to bill of lading and give it to Adam Vallory. Otherwise you don’t get your money. That’s all. Good-night.”
“Train time, Mr. Grillage,” interrupted the hotel clerk, in his most deferential tone.
“That’s all right; you hold that ’bus until I get ready!” snapped the departing guest. Then, thrusting a slip of paper into David’s hand: “Take that to your father, with my love. And a word to you, my boy”—this in a rumbling aside: “After this ’phone talk of mine gets handed about, your father will have all the credit he needs; but just the same, if you’ve got the level head that you seem to have, you’ll stand by and wind this bank business up, once for all. Your father’s too damned good to be a banker in any such wicked world as the one we’re living in. Dig up a good lawyer, push the crooked borrowers to a settlement, and see if you can’t screw enough out of it to square up and leave your father and sister a little something to live on. When it’s done, you let me know by wire, and I’ll give you a job where you can make good if you’ve got it in you. That’s all I’ve got to say. Tell your father good-by for me; I shan’t have time to stop at the bank.”
It was not until after the crazy omnibus had rattled away, bearing the St. Nicholas’s departing guest in galloping haste for the train, that David Vallory ventured to glance at the slip of paper which had been shoved into his hand. For an instant the figures on it dazzled him and he had a rush of blood to the brain that made the electric lights in the hotel lobby coruscate and take on many-colored halos.
The slip of paper was Eben Grillage’s personal cheque on a Chicago bank for the round sum of one hundred thousand dollars.
IV
An Honorable Discharge
DAVID VALLORY lost little time in crossing the square from the St. Nicholas to the bank corner; in point of fact, he was boyish enough to run. In the bank he found his father relocking the vault after having given the frightened farmer his money.