“All right! You will have to excuse me, Herr Schneider. I want to take a look about the town.”
And thus they parted without shaking hands.
“Tell the driver,” Brainard said to the waiter, “to show me everything worth seeing in your town.”
As he settled himself into the cab for his sightseeing, he mused:
“I wonder if I got enough! There’s no telling what the stuff is really worth. I’d have given it to him for a million, all of it, if he hadn’t taken me for a common sneak thief. Well, I guess I touched his limit. If he lays down on my proposition, I’ll have to look up the other crowd, and I suspect there isn’t much to choose between them so far as their methods are concerned. But I bet old Schnei will turn up in Paris before the week is out with a bag of dollars. And there are the bonds—they may be worth something, after all, to Melody!”
He interrupted his meditation to squint an eye at a palace toward which the cocher was furiously waving his whip.
“All right, cocher,—you can drive on,” he replied, having taken in the monument sufficiently. “Well”—he concluded his meditation aloud—“two millions, cash, is a pretty good bunch of money for any girl. I don’t believe she could have done any better herself. And there are the eight millions of bonds. Now where in thunder is Melody?”
Brainard waved him on, and continued his thoughts without speaking.
“There is the mine, too—the Melody mine. Queer name for a mine, and a queer name for a woman, too, now you think of it! Is there any Melody girl—woman, anyway, anywhere?”