Gordon nodded impassively. “Very well,” he said.
“I only hope he’ll prove worth the trouble,” he told himself, as the butler left the room. “He’s a spendthrift, of course. Money turns to water and runs through his fingers, no matter how fast it comes in. He’s just back from London, however, and I hardly think he has already squandered everything he picked up there.”
Then the door opened, and a tragic figure entered. The caller’s face was haggard, his eyes wild, his hair disordered. Even his clothing seemed carelessly worn and ill-fitting, though Lumsden had always been considered one of the best-dressed men in the profession. Certainly he did not look like a matinee idol now.
“Something terrible has happened!” he burst out. “Mr. Carter, I am being blackmailed! Somebody has learned the secret which I thought safe with you, and has demanded an enormous sum of money. It means my ruin, unless——”
“I know all about it, I am sorry to say,” the bogus detective interrupted.
Once more he gave a brief and very unsatisfactory explanation, pointing to the rifled safe, and winding up with a statement of his belief that there was nothing to do but to pay—“just as a temporary expedient, of course.”
Naturally, that advice did not appeal to the actor any more than it had to ex-Senator Phelps, but Gordon adroitly argued him into a somewhat less impatient mood.
“How much does he want?”
“A cool hundred thousand,” was the bitter reply, and it did not convey any real news to the man in Nick’s desk chair. “And I haven’t more than eighty thousand to my name!”