“H-h-how dje work it?” he asked in a die-away voice.
“By a forced sale of water rights to the North Pinto Gold Mining Company, dissolved, in which Mr. Roderick Hoff was vice-president and silent partner,” replied Average Jones with an amiable smile, as he opened the door significantly.
CHAPTER IV. THE MERCY SIGN—ONE
“Want a job, Average?”
Bertram, his elegance undimmed by the first really trying weather of the early summer, drifted to the coolest spot in the Ad-Visor’s sanctum and spread his languid length along a wicker settee.
“Give a man breathing space, can’t you?” returned Average Jones. “This is hotter than Baja California.”
“Why, I assumed that your quest of the quack’s scion would have trained you down fit for anything.”
“Haven’t even caught up with the clippings that Simpson floods me with, since I came back,” confessed the other. “What have you got up your faultlessly creased sleeve? It’s got to be something different to rouse me from a well-earned lethargy.”
“Because a man buncoes a loving father out of five thousand dollars,” Average Jones snorted gently, “is no reason why he should unanimously elect himself a life member of the Sons of Idleness,” murmured Bertram.
He cast an eye around the uniquely decorated walls, upon which hung, here, the shrieking prospectus of a mythical gold-mine; there a small but venomous political placard, and on all sides examples of the uncouth or unusual in paid print; exploitations of grotesque quackeries; appeals, business-like, absurd, or even passionate, in the form of “Wants;” threats thinly disguised as “Personals;” dim suggestions of crime, of fraud, of hope, of tragedy, of mania, all decorated with the stars of “paid matter” or designated by the Adv. sign, and each representing some case brought to A. Jones, Ad-Visor—to quote his hybrid and expressive doorplate—by some one of his numerous and incongruous clients.