“It's too bad—too bad for a young fellow to turn down such an opportunity,” he sighed. “It can be done without you, Boyne, in another way. The same result will happen. But you might as well be in on it. Now let me tell you a few instances of how some of the big men in this country got their start.”
Mr. Fogg was an excellent raconteur with a vivid imagination, and it did not trouble his conscience because the narratives he imparted to this wide-eyed youth were largely apocryphal.
“You see,” he put in at the end of the first tale, “what a flying start will do for a man. Suppose that chap I've just told you about sat back and refused to jump when the road was all open to him! You don't hear anybody knocking that man nowadays, do you? And yet that's the trick he pulled to get his start.”
With a similar snapper did Mr. Fogg touch up each one of his stories of success.
“I—I didn't have any idea—I thought they managed it some other way,” murmured David Boyne.
“Your horizon has been limited; you haven't been out in the world enough to know, my son.”
“I have heard of all those men, of course. They're big men to-day.”
“You didn't think they got to be millionaires by saving the money out of clerks' salaries, did you? Of course, Boyne, I admit that in this affair you'll be up to a little sharp practice. But you're not stealing anything. Nobody can lug off steamships in a vest pocket. It's only a deal—and deals are being made every day.”
Fogg was a keen judge of his fellow-men. He knew weakness when he saw it. He could determine from a man's lower lip and the set of his nose whether that person were covetous. And he knew now what signified the flush on Boyne's cheeks and the light in his eyes. However, there was something else to reckon with.
“I will not betray Mr. Franklin's confidence in me. Positively, I will not,” said the young man. “He's sick, and that would make it worse.”