Chick laughed and clicked the revolver suggestively.
“Don’t come any nearer that door, Garland, or there’ll be something doing,” he advised. “I wouldn’t shrink an instant from sending a bullet into your block of solid ivory. We’ve got your game down pat, now, and we’re going to get you.”
“What game?” Garland again demanded. “What do you mean?”
“Your looting game,” said Chick. “That’s a good name for it, too. You two rascals, evidently with others to help you, have taken advantage of the fact that the head of the business you only manage, Mr. Isaac Meyer, is a helpless paralytic and confined to his home.”
“How taken advantage?”
“You have been looting his business of all that it would stand without immediate detection,” said Chick. “You have been loaning small amounts on gems and jewels and the like, and then pawning the collateral elsewhere for a much larger sum, and whacking up the difference. When a customer shows up to redeem a pledge, if it happens to be one that you have put elsewhere, you stave him off until you can raise the dust to redeem it yourselves, in case you don’t have it on hand, that you may turn it over to the proper owner and thus avert exposure. But it’s bound to come, Garland; it’s bound to come. In fact, it already is here.”
“That’s what Nick Carter suspects, is it?”
Garland spoke with a sneer, but his voice had a quaking uncertainty that told of utter dismay, of a realization that he had played a losing game and must pay the price.
“Sure that’s what he suspects,” Chick replied complacently. “You’re a bunch of star looters, that’s what you are. When the books and vaults of the Imperial Loan Company are examined, you’ll be found to be a hundred thousand short, at least.”
“Confound you Carters, anyway!” Garland cried, with a snarl. “You know too much.”