“We’ll have to agree not to consider him,” he said. “We really did that you know when we started this thing. I think we can depend upon Miss London’s putting the finishing touches on the job.”
And Miss London did. She sent for Sam a week later and put tweny-five hundred dollars into his hand.
“That’s not to invest for me,” she said, “that’s for yourself. By the agreement I signed with you we were to split anything I got out of the colonel. Well, I went light. I only got five thousand dollars.”
With the money in his hand Sam stood by the side of a little table in her room looking at her.
“What did you tell the colonel?” he asked.
“I called him up here to my room last night and lying here in bed I told him that I had just discovered I was the victim of an incurable disease. I told him that within a month I would be in bed for keeps and asked him to marry me at once and to take me away with him to some quiet place where I could die in his arms.”
Coming over to Sam, Luella London put a hand upon his arm and laughed.
“He began to beg off and make excuses,” she went on, “and then I brought out his letters to me and talked straight. He wilted at once and paid the five thousand dollars I asked for the letters without a murmur. I might have made it fifty and with your talent you ought to get all he has in six months.”
Sam shook hands with her and told her of his success in doubling the money she had put into his hands. Then putting the twenty-five hundred dollars in his pocket he went back to his desk. He did not see her again and when, through a lucky market turn, he had increased the twenty thousand dollars she had left with him to twenty-five, he placed it in the hands of a trust company for her and forgot the incident. Years later he heard that she was running a fashionable dressmaking establishment in a western city.
And Colonel Tom Rainey, who had for months talked of nothing but factory efficiency and of what he and young Sam McPherson were going to do in the way of enlarging the business, began the next morning a tirade against women that lasted the rest of his life.