“You pay me now six hundred gold,” said Yi Poon.
“Thank you for the fool you are,” said Torres with untold mockery in his voice. “You will learn better perhaps some day the business of selling secrets. Secrets are not shoes or mahogany timber. A secret told is no more than a whisper in the air. It comes. It goes. It is gone. It is a ghost. Who has seen it? You can claim back shoes or mahogany timber. You can never claim back a secret when you have told it.”
“We talk of ghosts, you and I,” said Yi Poon calmly. “And the ghosts are gone. I have told you no secret. You have dreamed a dream. When you tell men they will ask you who told you. And you will say, ‘Yi Poon.’ But Yi Poon will say, ‘No.’ And they will say, ‘Ghosts,’ and laugh at you.”
Yi Poon, feeling the other yield to his superior subtlety of thought, deliberately paused.
“We have talked whispers,” he resumed after a few seconds. “You speak true when you say whispers are ghosts. When I sell secrets I do not sell ghosts. I sell shoes. I sell mahogany timber. My proofs are what I sell. They are solid. On the scales they will weigh weight. You can tear the paper of them, which is legal paper of record, on which they are written. Some of them, not paper, you can bite with your teeth and break your teeth upon. For the whispers are already gone like morning mists. I have proofs. You will pay me six hundred gold for the proofs, or men will laugh at you for lending your ears to ghosts.”
“All right,” Torres capitulated, convinced. “Show me the proofs that I can tear and bite.”
“Pay me the six hundred gold.”
“When you have shown me the proofs.”
“The proofs you can tear and bite are yours after you have put the six hundred gold into my hand. You promise. A promise is a whisper, a ghost. I do not do business with ghost money. You pay me real money I can tear or bite.”
And in the end Torres surrendered, paying in advance for what did satisfy him when he had examined the documents, the old letters, the baby locket and the baby trinkets. And Torres not only assured Yi Poon that he was satisfied, but paid him in advance, on the latter’s insistence, an additional hundred gold to execute a commission for him.