“I wonder how they overlooked this?” he questioned.
Again his eyes turned musingly to those five empty bottles, and again the conviction was borne in upon him that the wine had been drugged. Under no circumstances could his share, even an unequal share, of five bottles of champagne among five persons have worked this havoc in him.
“Spiked,” he concluded again in a tone of resignation. “At last they got to me.”
The silver-fizz was flat now, but every sip of it was nevertheless full of reviving grace, and he sat in the big leather rocker to think things over. As he did so his eye caught something that made him start from his chair so suddenly that he had to put both hands to his head. Under the table was a bit of light orange paper. A fifty-dollar bill! In that moment—that is, after he had painfully stooped down to get it and had smoothed it out to assure himself that it was real—this beautifully printed government certificate looked to him about the size of a piano cover. An instant before, disaster had stared him in the face. This was but Thursday morning, and, having paid his hotel bill on Monday, he had the balance of the week to go on; but for that week he would have been chained to this hotel. Now he was foot-loose, now he was free, and his first thought was of his only possible resource, Blackie Daw, in Boston!
It took two hours of severe labor on the part of a valet, two bell-boys and a barber to turn the Wallingford wreck into his usual well-groomed self, but the hour of sailing saw him somnolently, but safely ensconced on a Boston packet.
CHAPTER XV
THE BROADWAY QUARTET CONTINUES TO TAKE
WALLINGFORD’S MONEY
Blackie Daw’s most recent Boston address had been: “Yellow Streak Mining Company, Seven Hundred and Ten Marabon Building,” and yet when J. Rufus paused before number seven hundred and ten of that building he found its glass door painted with the sign of the National Clockers’ Association. Worried by the fact that Blackie had moved, yet struck by the peculiar coincidence of his place being occupied by the concern that had given him the tip on Razzoo, he walked into the office to inquire the whereabouts of his friend. He found three girls at a long table, slitting open huge piles of envelopes and removing from them money, postal orders and checks—mostly money, for the sort of people who patronized the National Clockers’ Association were quite willing to “take a chance” on a five- or a twenty-dollar bill in the mails. Behind a newspaper, in a big leather chair near a flat-top mahogany desk, with his feet conveniently elevated on the waste-basket, sat a gentleman who, when he moved the paper aside to see whom his visitor might be, proved to be Blackie Daw himself.