"Just sold that fine peach of a Guinea ten thousand dollars' worth of Hesperus Power bonds," chuckled Fred in irrepressible glee.
"But where," I demanded, "did you get the bonds to sell?"
"Haven't got them yet," he paced the room in nervous jubilation. "But we'll get them in a jiffy—at the National City Bank. They've got lots of 'em over there."
Something dark and heavy and cold seemed to have dropped inside of me upon the vital parts, and chilled me for an instant.
"So this is this kind of a business?" I muttered.
"This is the way this kind of a business begins," he replied composedly.
That interlude of actual business after the ferocious activity of renting, equipping and furnishing an office, getting stationery printed and engraved, installing a ticker, making that mysterious body of connections that was Fred's province, was sufficiently exhilarating to make me accept it without much scrutiny. After all, what could I do? This was the furrow in which my plow was set and this, I suppose, is the custom of the country.
"How," I could not help wonderingly asking, "did you land the effulgent Visconti?"
"Oh, he's a good scout," explained Fred. "He runs a banking house for his fellow dagoes in Macdougal Street. He saw we were new and he likes to give young fellows a chance. He was quite frank. You see, it's nothing for the big houses to sell ten bonds or so. But he knows that to us just opening up it means a lot more than the commission. It means a Sale. Oh, he's a sport, all right."
"That surprises me more than I can say," I told him.