"I am sorry to trouble you so soon, but I am very hard pressed."
"Hard pressed! So am I hard pressed. Here for a year and more I have been supporting you in your extravagance—you and your mistresses; you have been living on me like princes,—dress, drinking, feasting, horses, gambling!—among you, you make my money spin away like water. Every well has a bottom to it, and you have got to the bottom of mine."
Speyer laughed with savage incredulity.
"Any thing in reason I am ready to do for you; but it's of no use. More! more! is always the word. You think you have found a gold mine. You mistake. Here I have a note due to-morrow; and another on Monday—that was for money I borrowed to give you. Heaven knows how I shall pay them. Go back, and come again a month from this."
"It won't do. I must have it now."
"I tell you, I have none to give you."
"Do you see this?" said Speyer, producing a roll of printed papers, and giving one to Vinal.
It was Vinal's letter, in the form of a placard, with a statement of the whole affair prefixed. Speyer had had it printed secretly in New York, the names of Morton and Vinal being left blank, and ingeniously filled in by himself with a pen.
"Give me the money, or show me how to get it, or I will have you posted up at every street corner in town. I have your letter here. I shall send it to your friend, the editor of the Sink."
The Sink was a scurrilous newspaper, which the virtuous Vinal, always anxious for the morals of the city, had once caused to be prosecuted as a nuisance, for which the editor bore him a special grudge.