“That depends,” says I. “Any partic’lar place?”
“Of course,” says he. “Here at the club. I’m to meet Chick Sommers here in half an hour. We’ll have luncheon together and——”
“I’m on,” says I. “I don’t know Chick; but I’m a mixer, and I’ll stand for anything in the food line but cold egg. Scratch the chilled hen fruit and I’m with you.”
Know about Duke, don’t you? It ain’t much to tell. He’s just one of these big, handsome, overfed chappies that help the mounted traffic cops to make Fifth-ave. look different from other Main-sts. He don’t do any special good, or any partic’lar harm. Duke’s got just enough sense, though, to have spasms of thinkin’ he wants to do something useful now and then, and all I can dope out of this emergency call of his is that this is a new thought.
That’s the answer, too. He begins tellin’ me about it while the head waiter’s leadin’ us over to a corner table. Oh, yes, he’s going in for business in dead earnest now, y’know,—suite of offices, his name on the letterheads, and all that sort of thing, bah Jove!
All of which means that Mr. Chick Sommers, who was a star quarterback in ’05, when Duke was makin’ his college bluff on the Gold Coast, has rung him into a South Jersey land boomin’ scheme. A few others, friends of Chick’s, are in it. They’re all rippin’ good fellows, too, and awfully clever at planning out things. Chick himself, of course, is a corker. It was him that insisted on Duke’s bein’ treasurer.
“And really,” says Duke, “about all I have to do is drop around once or twice a week and sign a few checks.”
“I see,” says I. “They let you supply the funds, eh?”
“Why, yes,” says Duke. “I’m the only one who can, y’know. But they depend a great deal on my judgment, too. For instance, take this new deal that’s on; it has all been left to me. There are one hundred and eighteen acres, and we don’t buy a foot unless I say so. That’s where you come in, Shorty.”
“Oh, do I?” says I.