"Why, Thomas—you must be losing your mind! You've—you've been studying too hard; that's it—the term work up there in Boston has been too much for you."
"Cut it out, Mr. Farley," said Tom savagely, all the Gordon fighting blood singing in his veins. "You've got a thing to do, and it is going to be done before you leave America. Will you talk straight business, or not?"
The president adjusted his eye-glasses, and gave this brand-new Gordon a calm over-look.
"And if I decline to discuss business matters with a rude school-boy?" he intimated mildly.
"Then it will be rather the worse for you," was the defiant rejoinder. "Acting for my father and the minority stock-holders, I shall try to have you and your son held in America, pending an expert examination of the company's affairs."
It was a long shot, with a thousand chances of missing. If there was anything criminal in the Farley administration, the evidences were doubtless well buried. But Tom was looking deep into the shifty blue eyes of his antagonist when he fired, and he saw that he had not wholly missed. None the less, the president attempted to carry it off lightly.
"What do you think of this, Vincent?" he said, turning to his son. "Here is Tom Gordon—our Tom—talking wildly about investigations and arrests, and I don't know what all. Shall we give him his breakfast and send him back to school?"
Tom cut in quickly before Vincent could make a reply.
"If you're sparring to gain time, it's no use, Mr. Farley. I mean what I say, and I'm dead in earnest." Then he tried another long shot: "I tell you right now we've had this thing cocked and primed ever since we found out what you and Vincent meant to do. You must turn over the control of Chiawassee Consolidated, legally and formally, to my father before you go aboard the Baltic, or—you don't go aboard!"
"Let me understand," said the treasurer, cutting in. "Are you accusing us of crime?"