“We’ll call it twenty thousand, then, for the block of lots,” said the old man, smiling and rubbing his hands.
“Very well,” said Balcomb, “with two thousand as my fee in the matter; and an option to buy the creek strip at sixty thousand.”
The old man stared at him with a sudden malevolent light in his eyes, but he said with exaggerated dignity:
“Very well, Mr. Balcomb.”
Dameron drew from his desk an abstract of title covering the Roger Merriam addition. It was in due form, the work of a well-known title company. Balcomb took it and ran his eye through its crisp pages.
“You’ll take care of us on this order of court matter if I pass it for the present,” said Balcomb.
“I’m a man of my word,” declared Ezra Dameron.
So the next afternoon a deed was filed with the county recorder, conveying the block of lots to the Patoka Land and Improvement Company, Ezra Dameron receiving eighteen thousand dollars as consideration and J. Arthur Balcomb two thousand dollars as commission. Opportunities to make two thousand so easily were not to be put aside, and Balcomb’s conscience troubled him not at all over the transaction. Van Cleve, the vice-president and attorney, did exactly what Balcomb, the treasurer, told him to do without question; and when Balcomb expressed himself as satisfied that the court’s approval would be forthcoming shortly when the whole estate was settled, and that meanwhile the deed should be recorded, Van Cleve readily acquiesced. Balcomb told his associates that it was the only way in which Dameron would give the option.
Balcomb did not, of course, tell his associates that he was accepting a commission from Dameron; for there were times when J. Arthur Balcomb’s volubility gave way to reticence of the austerest kind. He plumed himself upon at last having secured at sixty thousand dollars an option on the creek strip, where the ideal apartment house was to be built; and he sent notices to his directors of a meeting to consider plans for building. The fact that the company had just bought, through his shrewd agency, something like fifty thousand dollars’ worth of lots for twenty thousand would, he told Van Cleve, “look good to the jays,” and it did.