He must have thought those bills represented the wealth of Croesus, or that they were magic, and no matter how many he might use, some mysterious agency would replace them.
At 11.30 o’clock that night the new automobile was backed up against the stage door of a Broadway playhouse, and half an hour later it was filled with as many girls as could possibly be crowded in.
In that startling way the boy with the big bill made his debut into the society of the line. He gave the girls a dinner that they are talking of yet, and before two hours had gone by they were calling him pet names and incidentally trying to get a line on the actual size of his bank roll. They worked individually, and each one could in fancy see herself installed in a fine house, mistress of unlimited means and the wife of an especially easy mark, made to order for a chorus girl.
You see he was so liberal that he deceived them, although, as a matter of fact, young ladies with their wide experience ought to have known better, and have figured out the limit of his possibilities.
These ten thousand dollars were left by the dead man to be a bait for the wolves, and he had arranged it so that the hand of his son should feed it to them bit by bit. There were other thousands behind these and they were to be protected by the knowledge of the fate of the ones which had gone before. It was willed that ten thousand dollars of experience might be bought with it, and the boy was doing his share of it very well. He left his home and took a nice little apartment so that he could have more liberty, which he needed just about that time. He lunched with a soubrette and dined with a singer. If he liked a show or fancied one of the girls in it, he engaged a box every night for the week. The crowd dubbed him The Little Millionaire, and he deserved the title, for he was certainly playing the star part, and he was always present at what are known as rackets where the chief source of amusement were girls who cut capers and danced to the music of male voices.
His automobile, which always carried a bunch of freight from which ribbons and feathers fluttered, denoting the sex of the wearers, of course, shot up and down and in and out in a most spectacular manner, and it, as much as anything else, helped to make him popular.
He must have known a bit about finance, for it looked to those who were watching his career as if he was spending about ten thousand a week, and so he got the reputation of doing—as sometimes happens in this world—that which was impossible.
But through it all he never showed his hand.
He was dining one night with an especially nice little girl of the stage to whom he had shown a lot of attention—which means in stage parlance that he had bought her presents worth accepting.
They had come to the third bottle of wine, and to her way of thinking, the time seemed about ripe for what she had in mind.