"All right. When I get through with the judge I shall want to go out to the dam. Will you wait and take me?"
"Surest thing on earth,"—with prompt acquiescence. And then: "Is it as bad as you thought it was going to be, John?"
"It's about as bad as it can be," was the sober reply, and with that Smith went in to wait for his interview with the Timanyoni's best-beloved jurist.
As we have seen, this was at nine o'clock, or a few minutes before the hour, and as Starbuck descended the stone steps to take his seat in the car, David Kinzie, at his desk in the Brewster City National, was asking the telephone "central" to give him the Timanyoni High Line offices. Martin, the bookkeeper, answered, and he took a message from the bank president that presently brought Colonel Dexter Baldwin to the private room in the bank known to nervous debtors as "the sweat-box".
"Sit down, Dexter," said the banker shortly; "sit down a minute while I look at my mail."
It was one of David Kinzie's small subtleties to make a man sit idly thus, on one pretext or another; it rarely failed to put the incomer at a disadvantage, and on the present occasion it worked like a charm. Baldwin had let his cigar go out and had chewed the end of it into a pulp before Kinzie swung around in his chair and launched out abruptly.
"You and I have always been pretty good friends, Dexter," he began, "and I have called you down here this morning to prove to you that I am still your friend. Where is your man Smith?"
Baldwin shook his head. "I don't know," he answered. "I haven't seen him since last evening."
"Are you sure he is still in town?"
"I haven't any reason to think that he isn't."