“And you failed, eh?”
“We failed all right. He didn’t have as much as a toothpick about him, and so, after dosing his coffee, for he doesn’t drink a drop of liquor, we had all our trouble for nothing. The girl went into a spasm of admiration over Thornton’s cleverness in being prepared for the unexpected, while Carrington was madder than a whole nest of hornets. I took him to his hotel and put him to bed, and that’s the last I’ve seen of him.”
“Well, now, you hear me,” said the man in the fedora hat, thumping the side of the bunch of spiles behind which Vance was listening to this enlightening conversation, “if he comes down here and gets away with a grain of information as big as one grain of those five million bushels stored in these, five elevators, I’ll give you leave to kick me from here to the mouth of the Mississippi.”
The remark was emphatic and forcible, and there was not the slightest doubt that Mr. Taggart meant every word of it, yet is it any wonder that Vance Thornton, under the circumstances, grinned as he had never grinned before in all his life?
CHAPTER VIII.
THE MAN FROM THE WEST.
If Guy Dudley and Mr. Taggart, the manager of the five elevators of Elevatorville, only suspected the injury they had inflicted on their cause by coming down to the water’s edge of that particular elevator under which Vance Thornton happened to be concealed at the time, and there telling all they knew to the winds, as they thought, there is not the least doubt that they would have felt like going to some quiet place and kicking themselves off the earth.
The dapper Mr. Dudley thought himself as smart as they make them in Chicago, but really he had lots to learn.
He was satisfied that young Thornton could not poke his nose into the town without he (Dudley) becoming immediately aware of the fact.
Yet Vance had already been more than twelve hours in Elevatorville without the dapper young man’s knowledge, and had practically accomplished the object of his visit through the indiscreet loquacity of the gentlemen who were “laying” for him.