“I sure will,” promised Jack heartily, “if you’d like it, sir,” and, flushed and radiant and smiling, was gone.
About four o’clock the door in Jim Fletcher’s room up-town—where a club of three law-students held their meetings for study, and where the confrère from Cambridge was expected this afternoon to battle with them over a special question—opened, and three bent heads lifted from a table littered with papers and legal-looking volumes to regard Jack Vance.
“Come in,” Fletcher threw at him. “You’re late. We’re half through. What are you grinning about?”
Jack shut the door inside with an air of reserved electricity which arrested the workers at the table. He came and stood over them and they all stared up at him; there appeared to be something to wait for.
“Gee!” spoke Jack at last. “Guess whom I’ve been lunching with.”
Carl Harrison drew a law-book toward him. “Don’t care,” he stated with disapproval. “Get to work, Jack; we’ve got a tough one on to-day.” But Joe Lewis and Jim were interested.
“What’s up?” Joe asked. “Get it out of your system, Johnny. Who?”
Jack stuck a thumb in each waistcoat pocket and looked “chesty.” “Oh,” he flung at them casually with his lips pursed and his eyes dancing. “Nothing uncommon. I simply lunched at the Lawyers’ Club down-town with four of me pals—Billion Bradlee—W. R. H., you know, the railroad king, and Judge Carroll, of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the president of the I. S. I. & O. Z. D., Mr. Howell, and Conway Fitzhugh, the Southern railway magnate—just us five, that’s all. We had some business to talk over.”
And Jack, grinning consumedly, agitating his fingers from the thumb fulcrums, posing his slim figure as near as might be to resemble a bay-windowed alderman, grinned more and watched the effect.
“Come off,” responded Jim Fletcher.