"Write that check!" Neil almost screamed. "We know you're slick enough to keep your tricks within legal bounds, and that's why these men are here."
The brow of Wallingford contracted and he tried to look angry, but his breath was coming short and there was a curious pallor around the edge of his lips and around his eyes.
"This is coercion!" he charged with dry mouth.
"Put it that way if you want to," agreed Neil hotly.
"We'll break your infernal neck, that's what we'll do!" put in a spokesman back toward the door, and there was a general pressing forward. Neil had lashed them into fury, and one rawboned fellow, a blacksmith, wedged through them with purple face and upraised fist. So heavily that he knocked the breath out of Clover with his chair back, Wallingford plumped down at the desk and whipped out his check book.
"I ask one thing of you," he said, as he picked up the pen with a curious trembling grimace that was almost like a smile, but was not. "You must leave me at least a thousand dollars to get away from here."
There was a moment of silence.
"That's reasonable," granted Neil, after careful consideration. "Give us the check for forty-four thousand."
Wallingford wrote it and then he put it in his pocket.
"I have the check ready, gentlemen," he announced, "but I'll give it to you at the entrance of my home—to a committee consisting of Neil and any two others you may select. If I hand it to you before I pass out at that door, some of you are liable to—to lose your heads."