Mr. Smalley visibly winced.
“A bill of exchange might have done him just as well,” he protested. “No non-employing person has need of actual currency in that amount. I’m afraid young Wix is very extravagant—very. By the way, Mr. Gilman, I have been forced, for protection and very much against my will, to take some stock in an enterprise with which I can not have my name associated for very obvious business reasons; so I have taken the liberty of having the stock made out in your name,” and, before young Gilman’s eyes, he spread his twenty-five-share certificate of The La Salle Grain and Stock Brokerage Company.
Gilman, pale before, went suddenly ghastly. The blow of mockery had come too soon upon the heels of his relief.
“I can’t have it,” he managed to stammer through parched lips. “I must refuse, sir. I—I can not be connected in any way with that business, Mr. Smalley. I—I abhor it. Never, as long as I live—”
Suddenly the fish-white face and staring eyes of Gilman were not in the line of Mr. Smalley’s astonished vision, for Gilman had slid to the floor, between his high stool and his desk. Sam Glidden, coming into the bank a moment after, found Smalley working feverishly over the prostrate form of his feebly reviving clerk.
CHAPTER V
JONATHAN REUBEN WIX CASTS ASIDE HIS ONLY
HANDICAP AND DISAPPEARS FOR EVER
Just as Jonathan Reuben Wix reached his home, a delivery man was taking in at the front door a fine dresser trunk. On the porch stood a new alligator traveling-bag, and a big, new suit-case of thick sole leather, trimmed profusely with the most expensive knobs and clamps, and containing as elaborate a toilet set as is made for the use of men. In the hall he found five big pasteboard boxes from his tailor. He had the trunk and the suit-case and the traveling-bag delivered up to his room; the clothing he carried up himself.