"I was wondering:... Suppose you were to tell your people that there's a young fellow here who'd like to give this store a boom.... Say he wants a little credit because—because Mr. Graham won't let him put in any cash——"
"Not a bit of use," Sperry negatived. "I would, myself, but the house—no."
"But suppose I pay this bill——"
"Pay it? You really mean that?"
"Certainly I mean it." Duncan produced the wad of bills which Kellogg had furnished him the night before his departure from New York. Thus far he had broken only one of the five-hundred-dollar gold certificates, and of that one he had the greater part left; living is anything but expensive in Radville.
"I'm beginning to understand that I was cut out for an actor," he told himself as he thumbed the roll with a serious air and an assumed indifference which permitted Sperry to estimate its size pretty accurately.
"That's quite a stack of chips you're carrying," Sperry observed.
Duncan's hand airily wafted the remark into the limbo of the negligible. "A trifle, a mere trifle," he said casually. "I don't generally carry much cash about me. Haven't for five years," he added irrepressibly. He extracted a fifty-dollar certificate from the sheaf, and handed it over.
"I'll take a receipt, but you needn't mention this to Mr. Graham just now."
"No, certainly not." Sperry scrawled his signature to the bill.