"How much?"
Broderick shook his finger at him.
"Foxy, foxy boy! Do you think I'd give up to you so easy? This particular deal I'm tellin' you about, is away back outside the statute of limitations. You couldn't get me on it if you would. It was the Terwilliger tract—I was chairman of the common council, finance committee, you remember? Bought the tract for twenty-five hundred and sold it to the city for two hundred and eighty thousand. That's me!"
"Good work!" said Murgatroyd, with genuine admiration. "I didn't know that you were in on that."
"In on it?" snorted Broderick. "I was the whole show! That's where I'm coy, my dear boy; it takes Broderick to do these things; but it takes a bigger man than Broderick to find 'em out."
Murgatroyd shook his head.
"They found me out, all right," he said.
Broderick waved his hand, and answered:—
"Not a bit of it! It's all blown over, and if it hasn't, it will. All they'll remember, after a while, is that you've got a wad of money. They'll forget how you got it, and they won't care." He puffed away and purred contentedly.
"You're a giant," he went on, "an intellectual giant to bag six figures." Then he waved his hand about the room and said: "You take this old court-house, for instance; I was on the buildin' committee, but to save my life—hold on a minute—" he pulled himself up with a round turn, "that was outside the statute, of course it was. Well, to save my life I couldn't pull more 'n a hundred and twenty-three thousand out of it. I came near gettin' caught, too," he admitted, laughing.