“I get it all,” answered Sam, and then leaning back in his chair launched into an explanation. When he had told her of the talk in the restaurant she sat with the checkbook lying before her and with the puzzled look still in her eyes.
Without giving her time for comment, Sam plunged into the midst of what had been in his mind to say to her.
“The woman will not bother the colonel any more,” he declared; “if that paper won’t hold her something else will. She respects me and she is afraid of me. We had a talk after she had signed the paper and she gave me the ten thousand dollars to invest for her. I promised to double it for her within a year and I want to make good. I want you to double it now. Make the check for twenty thousand.”
Sue Rainey wrote the check, making it payable to bearer, and pushed it across the table.
“I cannot say that I understand yet,” she confessed. “Did you also fall in love with her?”
Sam grinned. He was wondering whether he would be able to get into words just what he wanted to tell her of the actress soldier of fortune. He looked across the table at her frank grey eyes and then on an impulse decided that he would tell it straight out as though she had been a man.
“It’s like this,” he said. “I like ability and good brains and that woman has them. She isn’t a good woman, but nothing in her life has made her want to be good. All her life she has been going the wrong way, and now she wants to get on her feet and squared around. That’s what she was after the colonel for. She did not want to marry him, she wanted to make him give her the start she was after. I got the best of her because somewhere there is a snivelling little whelp of a man who has taken all the good and the fineness out of her and who now stands ready to sell her out for a few dollars. I imagined there would be such a man when I saw her and I bluffed my way through to him. But I do not want to whip a woman, even in such an affair, through the cheapness of some man. I want to do the square thing by her. That’s why I asked you to make that check for twenty thousand.”
Sue Rainey rose and stood by the desk looking down at him. He was thinking how wonderfully clear and honest her eyes.
“And what about the colonel?” she asked. “What will he think of all this?”
Sam walked around the desk and took her hand.