“There’s no question of promise. I don’t even get your idea.”
“Indeed! Suppose you give me credit for a gleam of intelligence. Nothing more is required to see your game. Yours and Embree’s. He wants to get his hands on a paper here. He fakes up this attack on me and The Guardian to bulldoze me into selling the paper. You are his tool. The pair of you think you can run me off my own property with an unloaded gun. Not A. M. Wymett!”
“Very ingenious. But Senator Embree does n’t happen to enter into this in any way, shape, or manner.”
“Then who is backing you? Is it Phipps and the brewery crowd? Or the banking trust? I don’t suppose you’ve saved the money out of your twenty-five a week from The Record.”
“That’s beside the question. The money is there. Seventy thousand dollars flat.”
Into Mr. Wymett’s parched-looking eyes shot a swift gleam, only to be as swiftly veiled. He lifted and slowly drank the liquor before him. He shook his head.
“Not to be considered. Absurd.”
“It is what I figure The Guardian to be worth; to have been worth up to two-fifteen this afternoon.”
“It is worth just as much now as it was yesterday.”
“Seventy thousand dollars,” pursued young Robson as if the other had not spoken. “I’d like your answer.”