She remembered Booker’s smiling fat face and bald head as she offered him her proposition. He always smiled, and it was a hateful, greasy, fixed sort of smile. She believed he was a Jew. But Jew or Gentile, he was a merciless money-spinner, ready to rob the world of its last dollar.
Her anger surged even now with her thought of the man. He had offered to take the block off her mother’s hands for two thousand dollars cash. It was the limit to which he would go. It was mortgaged for two thousand dollars to him. It was in the very centre of Beacon Glory, next to the Speedway Dance Hall. And even though the city was dead flat as a reaction from its early boom, the property was worth not a cent less than ten thousand dollars. It was maddening. It was a sheer “hold-up.” But she knew they were helpless in the man’s hands. Oh, if they could only tide over until Jim got back!
She had told her mother not a word of the man’s offer yet. Somehow she felt she had not the courage to tell her. Yet she would have to do so, and, worst of all, she knew they would have to accept the man’s offer or starve.
Well, she would have one slight consolation. Once the deed was signed, and the money was in her hands, she would tell “Bad” Booker all that was in her mind. She——
The sound of a footstep behind her broke up the half-fierce, almost tearful train of her thought. She turned sharply to discover Ivor McLagan breathing heavily after his climb.
“Say, Claire,” he cried, while he spread out his hands deprecatingly, and his smallish eyes twinkled humorously, “why in the name of everything holy make this darn country worse than it is? Why you need to climb a mile high to enjoy the thought of your Jim, boy, coming along, I just can’t see. I surely can’t!” Then he glanced quickly out to sea and took a deep breath. “My, but this is a swell spot!” he added soberly.
The girl’s bad time had passed. Her smile came on the instant.
“That’s quite a contradiction,” she said slily.
“Sure. Well, we’ll cut the first part right out.” McLagan’s twinkling gaze came back to the girl’s face, and he drank in the fresh beauty of it. “I couldn’t pass along into that nightmare city of ours without speaking my piece of gladness for your news. It’s bully! It certainly is. The boy’s made good. An’ for you folks, I guess, only just in time.”
The girl nodded as she looked up into the man’s plain face, and a flash of thoughtful regret for its plainness broke in on all the rest that preoccupied her.