“Well, of all the—” he began; but the major and the colonel had him by the arms and were dragging him outside. When they were gone—all of them—Mr. Betts indulged himself in the luxury of a still, small smile—a smile that curled his lips back just a trifle and died of frostbite before it reached his fossilized eyes.
“Gentlemen,” Mr. Witherbee was saying in his room at the Richland House ten minutes later, “the man has you at his mercy and apparently he knows it. I wouldn't be surprised if he had not already been in communication with the Gatins crowd. His attitude is suspicious. As I view it, it is most certainly suspicious. Gentlemen, I would advise you to close with him. He is asking a figure far in excess of the real value of the works—but what can you do?”
“And will you take the gasworks at sixty thousand?” inquired Major Covington hopefully.
“Ah, gentlemen,” said Mr. Witherbee, and his smile was sympathetic and all-embracing, “that, I think, is asking too much; but, in view of the circumstances, I will do this—I will take them at”—he paused to consider—“I will take them, gentlemen, at fifty thousand. In time I think I can make them worth that much to me; but fifty thousand is as far as I can go—positively. You stand to lose ten thousand on your deal for the gasworks, but I presume you will make that back and more on your sale to me of the light and power plant. Can't I offer you fresh cigars, gentlemen?”
If for any reason a run had started on any one of the three local banks the next day there would have been the devil and all to pay, because there was mighty little ready money in any one of them. Their vaults had been scraped clean of currency; and that currency, in a compact bundle, was rapidly traveling eastward in the company of a smallish iron-gray man answering to the name of Betts. At about the same moment Mr. Witherbee, with the assistance of the darky porter of the Richland House, was packing his wardrobe into an ornate traveling kit. As he packed he explained to Doctor Lake and Major Covington:
“I am called to Memphis twenty-four hours sooner than I had expected. Tomorrow we close a deal there involving, I should say, half a million dollars. Let us see—this is Wednesday—isn't it? I will return here on Friday morning. Meanwhile you may have the papers drawn by your attorney and ready for submission to my lawyer, Mr. Sharkey, who should arrive tomorrow from Cincinnati. If he finds them all shipshape, as I have every reason to expect he will find them, then, on Friday morning, gentlemen, we will sign up and I will pay the binder, amounting to—how much?—ninety thousand, I believe, was the figure we agreed upon. Quite so. Gentlemen, you will find a box of my favorite cigars on that bureau yonder. Help yourselves.”
No lawyer named Sharkey arrived from Cincinnati on Thursday; no J. Hayden Witherbee returned from Memphis on Friday,—nor was there word from him by wire or mail. The papers, drawn in Colonel Cope's best legal style, all fringed and trimmed with whereases and wherefores, waited—and waited. Telegrams which Major Covington sent to Memphis remained unanswered; in fact, undelivered. Major Covington suddenly developed a cold and sinking sensation at the pit of his stomach. In his associates he discerned signs of the same chilling manifestation. It seemed to occur to all of them at once that nobody had asked J. Hayden Witherbee for his credentials or had inquired into his antecedents. Glamoured by the grandeur of his person, they had gone along with him—had gone along until now blindly. Saturday, hour by hour, darkling suspicion grew in each mind and reared itself like a totem pole adorned with snake-headed, hawk-clawed figments of dread. And on Saturday, for the first time in a solid week the Daily Evening News carried no front-page account of the latest doings and sayings of J. Hayden Witherbee.
Upon a distracted conference, taking place Saturday night in the directors' room of the bank, intruded the sad figure of Cassius Poindexter, combing back his side whiskers like a man eternally on the point of parting a pair of lace curtains and never coming through them.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but I've got something to say that I think you gentlemen oughter hear. If you thought those two—Witherbones, or whatever his name is, and my late employer, Henry Betts—if you all thought those two were strangers to one another you were mistaken—that's all. Two weeks ago I saw a letter on Betts' desk signed by this man Witherbee—if that's his name. And Tuesday when Betts told me he was goin' to sell out, I remembered it.”
The major was the first to get his voice back; and it was shaky with rage and—other emotions.