"Whole heap o' things. The best guess is that he's a jail-break' from
somewheres back in the States. He ain't no common 'bo; that's a dead
cinch. Gatrow, the quarry foreman, puts it up that he done something he
had to run for."
"Get him drunk and find out," suggested Stanton shortly.
"Not him," said the round-faced villain, with the ingratiating smile
wrinkling at the corners of the fat-embedded eyes. "He's the
take-a-drink-or-let-it-alone kind."
"Well, keep your eye on him and your ears open. I have a notion that
he's been sent here--by some outfit that means to buck us. If he hasn't
any backing----"
The interruption was the hurried incoming of the young man with sleepy
eyes and the cigarette stains on his fingers, and for once in a way he
was stirred out of his customary attitude of cynical indifference.
"Smith and Colonel Baldwin are over yonder in Kinzie's private office,"
he reported hastily. "Before they shut the door I heard Baldwin
introducing Smith as the new acting financial secretary of the Timanyoni
Ditch Company!"
XI
When Greek Meets Greek
Smith allowed himself ten brief seconds for a swift eye-measuring of the
square-shouldered, stockily built man with a gray face and stubbly
mustache sitting in the chair of authority at the Brewster City National
before he chose his line of attack.
"We are not going to cut very deeply into your time this morning, Mr.
Kinzie," he began when the eye-appraisal had given him his cue. "You
know the history of Timanyoni Ditch up to the present, and you have no
doubt had your own misgivings about the wisdom of its financing on such
a small scale, and as a purely local enterprise. Others have had the
same misgivings, and--well, to cut out the details, there is to be a
complete reorganization of the company on a new basis, and we are here
to offer to take your personal allotment of the stock off your hands at
par for cash. Colonel Baldwin has stipulated that his friends in the
original deal must be protected, and----"
"Here, here--hold on," interrupted the bank president; "you're hitting
it up a little bit too fast for me, Mr. Smith. Before we get down to any
talk of buying and selling, suppose you tell me something about yourself
and your new company. Who are you? and whereabouts do you hold forth
when you are at home?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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