The market had gone sadly against him. Loss on loss had swept away the great sum which he had received as a bribe, and his wife’s recurrent extravagance at last led him to draw the fifteen thousand dollars of his salary for the current year.
Noel Endicott handed over the check without a word, and the fact was soon the property of Roundsman Daly. “I’ll gather him in when that money is gone,” chuckled Daly. “He is near to the end of his rope now.”
“I can see the white hand that is throttling him!” muttered the blunt policeman. “It’s the mistress. She will soon bring him to his knees, and maybe there’ll be no work left for me to do,” he said with a professional sigh of regret. For, he had set his heart on “running Vreeland in.” “I’ll have him, dead or alive, yet,” the policeman swore.
But sterner than all the blows of Fate was the blunt rebuff of Senator Garston, when Vreeland, with burning eyes, demanded a considerable money advance.
“I gave you enough money for four years at least. You have your own income down there; what the devil have you done with it?”
The haggard man murmured complaints of his wife’s extravagance. There was his whole line of privately held stocks in danger now, and the market was faltering. The Senator read the truth in his eyes.
“See here, Vreeland!” angrily shouted Garston. “You’ve been drinking far too much of late. I will see that your wife has money—for herself, but not for you. I hear that you are deep in outside speculations. If so, remember the old remark about a fool and his money.”
Harold Vreeland turned without a word and left his secret enemy, now his master. “If I only dared to use the secret of the document!” he raged, as he sought the hospitality of valet Bagley at the Elmleaf.
There were days now when he did not go to the office where the business of “Wyman & Vreeland” hummed merrily along.
Days, too, when he did not return to Mrs. Katharine Vreeland’s informal court at the Hotel Savoy.