"He's gone on a trip—to the Hot Springs," snapped Podmore. "Come back in a month or six weeks and perhaps you can see him then. Good day, sir."
For a few minutes after the big young man had bowed himself out with mock humility, Mr. Podmore stood fingering the card and frowning at the window. It was an engraved card, his fingers told him. He did not like feeling that he had made a mistake in any way; but that is precisely how he did feel. Yet he was sure he had never met this young man before, in spite of a certain familiarity of face that haunted him. Not being a regular reader of the sporting pages, he was at a loss to account for this, as he prided himself on his memory for faces.
With a shrug in dismissal of the inconsequential, Mr. Podmore went to lunch. He had comfortable quarters at the Queen's Hotel, just a block from the Union Station, and after a light lunch in the big dining-room he idled about the rambling old rotunda for an hour or more, smoking many cigarettes and attempting to read a magazine. The solicitous anxiety of his waiter during luncheon had earned that surprised individual a rebuke and cost him the usual tip; the friendly advances of a hotel guest, which ordinarily would have been met by equal geniality, finally sent Podmore up in the old-fashioned elevator to his room, where he locked the door and began pacing restlessly back and forth. Not until a sixth glance at his watch indicated the approach of 2 o'clock did his unusual fidgetiness begin to disappear; but when at last he walked briskly out of the hotel Mr. Podmore, to all intents, had regained his normal self-possession.
He went straight to the down-town offices of the Alderson Construction
Company, arriving punctual to the minute of his appointment. Both
Nickleby and Alderson were already there.
"Well, we're all here, Alderson. Are you waiting for somebody to open with prayer?" complained J. Cuthbert Nickleby with an impatient glance at his watch after the greetings were over. "I don't see why the devil you needed me here at all, Pod. Why all the ceremony?" The President of the Interprovincial Loan & Savings Company was a thin, sallow man with a thin, tight line of a mouth. The cynicism of his expression was chronic.
"Because you'd be the first to holler if anything went wrong," retorted Podmore, eyeing him pointedly as he tilted his hat to the back of his head and proceeded calmly to skin the glove from his left hand. "We're all in this together, J. C., and that's why I insisted on you being here—to see that everything is according to Hoyle."
"Aint getting cold feet already are you?"
An easy laugh was Mr. Podmore's only rejoinder to this insult. They both watched Alderson, who had swung open the door of the safe and was reaching into its depths. The contractor was stout and florid, and his face was flushed as he rose jerkingly from his knee and tossed a package of crisp bank notes to the table.
"Well, there 'tis, just as it come from the Inter-provincial this mornin'," he remarked, and picked up his cigar from the edge of the safe.
"Look at the way he tosses it around, would you!" chuckled Podmore. "You could buy a bunch of peanuts with that package, Frank,—a million bags at a nickle the bag." This was a hit at Alderson's fondness for munching peanuts, and Alderson's tenor laugh led the trio. Podmore picked up the package and riffled the bills carelessly. "Counted it, J. C.?"