“Great Scott, Calvin—don’t say that!” he implored. “You can’t throw us down that way! Why, good Lord, man, if it hadn’t been for you and your brains.... But, pshaw! there’s no use in talking about it; you simply can’t go and leave us hanging over the ragged edge!”
“I can; and I guess I must,” insisted Sprague gently. “And the worst of it is, Dick, I can’t tell you or anybody else the why. It’s just up to me, and I’ve got it to do.”
Maxwell’s perturbation had cleared his brain like a bucketing of cold water. “Tell me, Calvin,” he broke out; “is the girl mixed up in it?”
“She is,” was the brief admission.
“Is she gone, or going—back East, I mean?”
“N-no; not immediately, I believe.”
Maxwell sat back in his chair and began to twist nervously at the charm on his watch-fob.
“I suppose I haven’t any kick coming,” he said at length. “What you have done for me this summer couldn’t be measured in money, and I have no right to ask you to go on giving your time and your brains on the score of friendship.”
“There isn’t any bigger score in this little old round world of ours, Dick,” said the other gravely. “I’m a cold-blooded fish, and I know it. I ought to stand by you; every decent thing in me but one urges me to stand by you. But that one exception queers me. I hope you’ll win out; I hope to God you’ll win out, Dick; but I can’t be the man to put the club into your hands this time.”
The snappy little superintendent took his defeat hard. For some further time he used every argument he could devise to persuade Sprague to change his mind. But at the end the big man was shaking his head regretfully.