“Not yet.” Crozier smiled sardonically.
“Well, I apologise, but what I’ve said, Mr. Kerry, is said as man to man. You’re ridin’ game in a tough place, as any man has to do who starts with only his pants and his head on. That’s the way you begun here, I guess; and I don’t want to see your horse tumble because some one throws a fence-rail at its legs. Your class has enemies always in a new country—jealousy, envy.”
The lean, aristocratic, angular Crozier, with a musing look on his long face, grown ascetic again, as he held out his hand and gripped that of the other, said warmly: “I’m just as much obliged to you as though I took your advice, Sibley. I am not taking it, but I am taking a pledge to return the compliment to you if ever I get the chance.”
“Well, most men get chances of that kind,” was the gratified reply of the gambling farmer, and then Crozier turned quickly and entered the doorway of the British Bank, the rival of that from which he had turned in brave disappointment a little while before.
Left alone in the street, Sibley looked back with the instinct of the hunter. As he expected, he saw a head thrust out from the window where Studd Bradley and his friends had been. There was an hotel opposite the British Bank. He entered and waited. Bradley and one of his companions presently came in and seated themselves far back in the shadow, where they could watch the doorway of the bank.
It was quite a half-hour before Shiel Crozier emerged from the bank. His face was set and pale. For an instant he stood as though wondering which way to go, then he moved up the street the way he had come.
Sibley heard a low, poisonous laugh of triumph rankle through the hotel office. He turned round. Bradley, the over-fed, over-confident, over-estimated financier, laid a hand on the shoulder of his companion as they moved towards the door.
“That’s another gate shut,” he said. “I guess we can close ‘em all with a little care. It’s working all right. He’s got no chance of raising the cash,” he added, as the two passed the chair where Sibley sat—with his hat over his eyes, chewing an unlighted cigar.
“I don’t know what it is, but it’s dirt—and muck at that,” John Sibley remarked as he rose from his chair and followed the two into the street.
Bradley and his friends were trying steadily to close up the avenues of credit to the man to whom the success of his enterprise meant so much. To crowd him out would mean an extra hundred and fifty thousand dollars for themselves.