“What’s that?” demands Wycherley quickly. “Is it so bad as to keep you from sleeping? Aleck, my poor fellow, I pity you.”
“Nonsense! I’m bothering my head over quite another thing. In fact, I’ve a nut to crack that threatens to do me up. Pardon, old boy, but I’ve been thinking of the story you told me.”
“You mean about old Samson; of course you are deeply interested now—that’s natural. To the best of my belief he’s a millionaire and better—lives in grand style on the lake shore. I walked past the house several times, because, you see, I wanted to understand how the land lay, if I was to be a prospective son-in-law—ha, ha. All dreams knocked in the head now, I assure you, dear boy. I shall feel at liberty to throw a kiss to the pretty girl in the cigar stand. My bonds are gone, the shackles loosened, and Claude Wycherley is again a free man.”
An odd genius this, assuredly. Aleck can never edge a word in so long as his flow of breath lasts, so he usually holds his peace until the actor pauses.
“I want to ask you a few questions,” he says.
“A thousand, if you wish. I would do anything for you, Aleck. Again you have saved my life.”
“How?” demands the Canadian.
“Only for you I should perhaps have been fool enough to have attempted that climb on the wheel. I am in poor condition to-night, and ten to one I would have lost my grit and my grip. Then they’d have swept me up below, and poor Wycherley would have been a bursted bubble, a back number. So I feel awfully grateful to you. Ask me any favor and I’ll put myself out to do it—anything but giving you a tip on the market. That’s a dead secret yet—my plans are not quite perfected. If I win that million now——”
“Hang the million! What I want to know concerns that part of your story in which the Chicagoan brought his Georgian wife—stolen from the Turkish pasha—to this place.”
“All right. What I know is at your service. As I learned it from his royal nibs, Scutari, of course I’m in the dark wherever he is.”