"It is fraud!" Marx shouted, shaking his fist in my face as we left.
Perhaps he was right; but whatever fraud there was in the transaction did not concern Marx or the men he represented. They had been euchred at their own game. And they knew it: we never heard anything more from the Strauss crowd about the London and Chicago bonds.
"Well, you've got it," Slocum said, as we came away from the sale. "I hope we won't have trouble with Lokes."
"That's all right," I replied. "We've got him where he can't make trouble."
"There's usually a tail to this kind of thing—you never can tell when you have reached the end."
But I was too jubilant to take gloomy views. The skirmish was over, and we were a step nearer my goal.
A few days after that I ran across John Carmichael as I was picking my way in the muck out of the Yards. He was driving in a little red-wheeled road wagon such as the local agents use for running about the city. He called out:—
"Hey, Van Harrington! Come over here!"
"Can't Strauss do any better by you than that? Or maybe you have gone back to collecting again?" I asked.
The Irishman grunted his acknowledgment of my joke, and we talked about one thing and another, both knowing perfectly well what there was between us. Finally he said it:—