If he had four hundred dollars, all his own, he would throw up the job and use it in one delicious round of travel. By the time it was exhausted he could obtain another position in a pleasing environment. In logical sequence he decided he might as well allow his imagination a wider range and play at taking a vacation with the largest sum ever entrusted to his care for a single night. He remembered this to be an even thousand dollars, sent down by a big operator in payment for horses in the lumber camps.
A thousand dollars offered his fancy vastly more possibilities to work with. The four hundred became insignificant. As his duties permitted him much time for reflection, he carried the thought back to his dingy office and entertained it by consulting maps in the railroad folders. In this fashion he took a hurried excursion across the continent and spied out the land. Then he became critical and weighed and balanced different localities.
The Southwest, free from cold, gray Autumnal rains, howling snows and Spring inundations, finally appealed to him as being ideal. Of course, there might be two thousand dollars entrusted to him any night, especially now that it was Autumn and the lumbermen were stocking up for the Winter campaign.
It was at that precise point that his cheek reddened and he felt a touch of alarm as he angrily told himself such imagining was immoral, for it was based on the suggestion that he steal the money. He condemned the suggestion wrathfully as he walked a quarter of a mile to the lonely home where he boarded, and yet he was more downcast than ever over his colorless place in life.
On returning to the station to close up for the night, which meant a weary wait for the up-passenger to pull in, he returned to the suggestion abruptly and recklessly. It was the sight of the porters making up the berths, the comradeship in the smoking compartment, that plunged him into full revolt; only now he proceeded on the theory the money was legitimately his.
“Well, I guess I’ve earned it. What if I should take it, providing I could get away with it? How would I spend it?”
This surrender eased him much. Of course he wouldn’t take it, not a penny; but it’s impossible to picture a career of spending until the imagination has logically furnished the requisite possession. Now he had mentally satisfied his imagination as to possession, although the technique was illegal. Fortunately there is no law punishing a man for inwardly discussing the possible assets of a crime.
Of course, Parsly merely intended to pursue his day-dreams unhampered by any irritating self-criticism. He had systematically arranged his data and could spend a million a day, should he choose. That was where he erred. His imagination became a hard taskmaster, very exacting. Once he accepted the suggestion that the money was to come to him through theft, his methodical mind insisted on reviewing the possibilities of detection before permitting him to enjoy the fruits.
“Wouldn’t you be caught and arrested before you could make a beginning?” was the cautious query he was forced to put to himself.
Such nagging is very annoying, and to satisfy his mysterious Pyrrhonist and continue with his Spanish architecture, he set himself about planning how the trick could be done without his being detected.