He walked to the door and looked out. "There comes our carriage," he called. "Get Rogers and we'll be movin'."
"Carriage!" cried David.
"Sure. D'you think we're goin' to let Chambers and his bunch think we're a lot o' cheapskates? Not much. We're goin' to do this thing proper."
"But Mr. Chambers himself uses the street cars."
"Well, he can afford to," the Mayor returned with equanimity. "We can't."
When David walked with Rogers to the carriage he would not have been surprised had the Mayor handed them for their lapels a bunch of roses knotted with ribbon. They settled back against the cushions and suspense silenced them—and with hardly a word they rumbled over to Broadway, down into Wall Street and up before Mr. Chambers's office.
As they stepped from the carriage, Rogers's thin fingers gripped David's hand like taut cords. Clasp, face, and the feverish fire in his eyes told David how great was the strain Rogers bore. This was the climax of his life.
David returned the pressure of his hand. "It'll be all right," he whispered reassuringly.
They went up the broad steps into a tiled hallway, and turned to their right to the entrance of the private banking house of Alexander Chambers & Co. An erect, liveried negro, whose stiffly formal manners suggested a spring within him, admitted them into a great light room, in which, behind a partition of glass and bronze grating that half reached the ceiling, sat scores of men working swiftly without appearance of speed. A word and a lifted finger from the black automaton directed them to the far end of the room. Here a man with the bearing of a statesman, Mr. Chambers's doorkeeper, bowed them into three leather-seated chairs, and carried their names into Mr. Chambers's private secretary.
They did not speak; the nearness of the climax awed even the Mayor. And to add to the suspense throbbing within him, David began to wonder how he would be greeted by Mr. Chambers, whom he had not seen since his ante-prison days.