“I’m not asking much, Jack.”
“Luck, I’d let you have it if I dared. Why, we’re running close to the wind. Public confidence is a mighty ticklish thing. If I didn’t have twenty thousand coming from El Paso on the Flyer to-night I’d be uneasy for the bank.”
“Twenty thousand on the Flyer. I reckon you ship by express, don’t you?”
“Yes. Don’t mention it to anyone. That twenty thousand would come handy to a good many people in this country these times.”
“It would come right handy to me,” Luck laughed ruefully. “I need every cent of it. After the beef roundup, I’ll be on Easy Street, but it’s going to be hard sledding to keep going till then.”
“You’ll make a turn somehow. It will work out. Maybe when money isn’t so tight I’ll be able to do something for you.”
Luck returned to the hotel morosely, and tried to figure a way out of his difficulties. He was not going to be beaten. He never had accepted defeat, even in the early days when he had sometimes taken a lawless short cut to what he wanted. By God, he would not lose out after all these years of fighting. It had been his desperate need of money that had made him sit in last night’s poker game. But he had succeeded only in making a bad situation worse. He knew his debts by heart, but he jotted them down on the back of an envelope and added them again.
| Mortgage on ranch (due Oct. 1), | $13,000 |
| Note to First National, | 3,500 |
| Note to Reynolds, | 1,750 |
| I O U to Mackenzie, | 1,200 |
| Same to Flandrau, | 400 |
| Same to Yesler, | 300 |
| ——— | |
| Total, $20,150 | |
Twenty thousand was the sum he needed, and mighty badly, too. Absentmindedly he turned the envelope over and jotted down one or two other things. Twenty thousand dollars! Just the sum Jordan had coming to the bank on the Flyer. Subconsciously, Luck’s fingers gave expression to his thoughts. $20,000. Half a dozen times they penciled it, and just below the figures, “W. & S. Ex. Co.” Finally they wrote automatically the one word, “To-night.”
Luck looked at what he had written, laughed grimly, and tore the envelope in two. He threw the pieces in the waste paper basket.