“Well,” I said, “I’ve ten thousand dollars of my own, as you know, and I’ve been offered a big opportunity of making a hundred thousand. Safe as houses. I want ten thousand to put with mine, I wouldn’t ask you to risk yours if I wasn’t risking mine.”
“What’s the spec.?” he asks.
“Can’t tell you that,” I said—“I’m under promise, but you know me and I give you my word of honour your money is as safe as if it was in your pocket—safer.”
“Well, I’d do it if I could,” he says, “you know me and that I’m not lying when I speak, but I can’t, haven’t got it.”
“But, Buck,” I says, “why, only a month ago you had thirty thousand dollars in the bank.”
Buck nods and goes on. “I haven’t got it to put my hand on,” he says. “My wife is keeping it for me. She says what with those New York banks going bust last spring and one thing and another, banks aren’t safe and she wants to invest it, she’s over at St. Jo to-day looking at some property.”
“Where’s she got the money?” I asks.
“In that safe,” says he.
Sure enough there was a big iron safe in the corner of the room half hid by a screen.
Seeing how the land lay, I said no more, and he changed the subject, going back to what he was saying when I first came in, how that he had been coming to see me that afternoon about a matter of business.