"How big a price?"
"That I couldn't say without seeing him. Knowing the sort of person he is, my guess is that he'd expect you to hand him over a good-sized chunk of money to begin with—as a proof of your intentions to do business with him. You'd have to pay him in cash; he'd be too wise to take a check. And then he might want so much apiece for each plate or he might insist on your paying him a lump sum for the whole lot. You see, what he evidently expects to do is to sell them to your husband, and he'd expect you at least to meet the price your husband would have to pay. Any way you look at it he's got you at his mercy—and, as I see it, you'll probably have to come to his terms if you want to keep this thing a secret."
"Where is this man? You keep saying you want to serve me—can't you bring him to me?"
"I'm afraid he wouldn't come. If he's engaged in a shady business—if he's cooked up a deliberate scheme to trap you—he won't come near you. That's my guess. But if you are willing to trust me to act as your representative maybe the whole thing might be arranged and no one except us ever be the wiser for it."
Mrs. Propbridge being an average woman did what the average woman, thus cruelly circumstanced and sorely frightened and half frantic and lacking advice from honest folk, would do. She paid and she paid and she kept on paying. First off, it appeared the paper had to be recompensed for its initial outlay and for various vaguely explained incidental expenses which it had incurred in connection with the affair. Then, through Townsend, the unknown principal demanded that a larger sum should be handed over as an evidence of good faith on her part before he would consider further negotiations. This, though, turned out to be only the beginning of the extortion processes.
When, on this pretext and that, she had been mulcted of nearly fourteen thousand dollars, when her personal bank account had been exhausted, when most of her jewelry was secretly in pawn, when still she had not yet been given the telltale plates, but daily was being tortured by threats of exposure unless she surrendered yet more money, poor badgered beleaguered little Mrs. Propbridge, being an honest and a straightforward woman, took the course she should have taken at the outset. She went to her husband and she told him the truth. And he believed her.
He did not stop with believing her; he bestirred himself. He had money; he had the strength and the authority which money gives. He had something else—he had that powerful, intangible thing which among police officials and in the inner politics of city governments is variously known as a pull and a drag. Straightway he invoked it.
Of a sudden Chappy Marr was aware that he had made a grievous mistake. He had calculated to garner for himself a fat roll of the Propbridge currency; had counted upon enjoying a continuing source of income for so long as the wife continued to hand over hush money. Deduct the cuts which went to Zach Traynor, alias Townsend, for playing the part of the magazine editor, and to Cheesy Mike Zaugbaum, that camera wizard of newspaper staff work turned crook's helper—Zaugbaum it was who had worked the trick of the photographs—and still the major share of the spoils due him ought, first and last, to run into five gratifying figures. On this he confidently had figured. He had not reckoned into the equation the possibility of invoking against him the Propbridge pull backed by the full force of this double-fisted, vengeful millionaire's rage. Indeed he never supposed that there might be any such pull. And here, practically without warning, he found his influence arrayed against an infinitely stronger influence, so that his counted for considerably less than nothing at all.
Still, there was a warning. He got away to Toronto. Traynor made Chicago and went into temporary seclusion there. Cheesy Zaugbaum lacked the luck of these two. As soon as Mrs. Propbridge had described the ingratiating Mr. Murrill and the obliging Mr. Townsend to M. J. Brock, head of the Brock private-detective agency, that astute but commonplace-appearing gentleman knew whom she meant. Knowing so much, it was not hard for him to add one to one and get three. He deduced who the third member of the triumvirate must be. Mr. Brock owed his preëminence in his trade to one outstanding faculty—he was an honest man who could think like a thief. Three hours after he concluded his first interview with the lady one of his operatives walked up behind Cheesy and tapped him on the shoulder and inquired of him whether he would go along nice and quiet for a talk with the boss or was inclined to make a fuss about it. In either event, so Cheesy was assured, he, could have his wish gratified. And Cheesy, who had the heart of a rabbit—a rabbit feeding on other folks' cabbage, but a timorous, nibbling bunny for all that—Cheesy, he went.
In Toronto Marr peaked and pined. He probably was safe enough for so long as he bided there; there had been no newspaper publicity, and he felt reasonably sure that openly, at least, the aid of regular police departments would not be set in motion against him; so he put the thoughts of arrest and extradition and such like unpleasant contingencies out of his mind. But li'l' old N'York was his proper abiding place. The smell of its streets had a lure for him which no other city's streets had. His crowd was there—the folk who spoke his tongue and played his game. And there the gudgeons on which his sort fed schooled the thickest and carried the most savory fat on their bones as they skittered over the asphaltum shoals of the Main Stem.