“You don’t look it!” Fay exclaimed. “Upon my word I don’t believe you’re Charlie Laurie’s daughter. Why, he is hardly your kind—at all.”
“Laying aside compliments, Mr. Fay, and how I found where you were here in California and—so many things that take up time, I’ve got a proposition to make which should be mutually advantageous. In other words you are the only man in the world I would let in on a great, big job.”
Fay removed his cigarette from his mouth and eyed the ashes. He ran his slender fingers through his prematurely gray hair. His face lighted with retrospection.
“Go on Miss—”
“Saidee Isaacs, they call me, although you know my name is Saidee Laurie.”
“Proceed, Miss Isaacs, with your plan.”
The girl’s olive-shaped and tinted eyes swept the golf-links. She brushed back a lock of sherry-colored hair.
“I’m going to help you crack a safe,” she informed him, “The safe—or goopher, as Father would call it—is in the brokerage office of Frank Robertson Pope, otherwise known in California get-rich-quick circles as ‘The Black Cougar.’”
Fay crushed his cigarette. A film dropped over his eyes. His lips hardened to a straight line.
“Go on,” he said.