“That’s what I said. The question is whether I shall speak it or not.”
“To be frank with you”—Horace smiled a little—“I hope very much that you will.”
“I daresay. But have you got the nerve for it?—that’s the point. Can you keep your mouth shut, and your head clear, and will you follow me without kicking or blabbing? That’s what I want to know.”
“And that’s just what I can’t tell you. I’m not going to bind myself to do unknown things.” Horace said this bravely enough, but the shrewd, listening ear understood very well the lurking accent of assent.
“You needn’t bind yourself to anything, except to tell Tracy nothing till I give you the word, and then only what we shall agree upon. Of course, later on he will have to know something about it. But leave that to me. And mind, mum’s the word.” Mr. Tenney rose now, not tentatively, but as one who is really going. Horace sprang to his feet as well, and despite the other’s declaration that he was pressed for time, and had already stayed too long, insisted on detaining him.
“What I don’t understand in all this,” he said, hurriedly—“for that matter the whole thing is a mystery—but what I particularly fail to see is your object in benefiting me. The two things don’t hitch. You tell me that you have got my father in a hole, and then you offer me a great and substantial prize. I don’t catch the sequence. You are not the man to do things for nothing. What you haven’t told me is what there is in this affair for you.”
Mr. Tenney seemed complimented by this tribute to his commercial sense and single-mindedness. “No, I haven’t told you,” he said, buttoning his coat. “That’ll come in due time. All you’ve got to do meanwhile is to keep still, and to take the thing when it comes to you. Let me know at once, and say nothing to any living soul—least of all Tracy—until you’ve talked with me. That oughtn’t to be hard.”
“And suppose I don’t like the conditions?”
“Then you may lump them,” said Schuyler Ten, ney, disclosing his small teeth again in a half-smile, as he made his way out.