Mr. Gamble, on his arrival the following afternoon, found Miss Purry very coldly regretful that she had already disposed of her property for a working-girls' home, at a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, having made a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reduction by way of a donation to the cause. Johnny drove back into the city rapidly—for he was now only sixteen hours ahead of his schedule. He was particularly out of sorts because Miss Purry had mentioned that the De Luxe Apartments Company had been after the plot. It is small satisfaction to a loser to have his judgment corroborated.
There was a Bronx project, involving the promotion of a huge exclusive subdivision, which he had hoped to launch; but during his call on Miss Purry that scheme went adrift through the sudden disagreement of the uncertain Wobbles brothers who owned the land. It was a day of failures; and at four o'clock he returned to the office and inscribed, upon the credit side of his unique little day-book, the laconic entry:
"April 28. Two flivvers. $0."
Loring, pausing behind him and looking over his shoulder, smiled—and added a climax. "Jacobs attached your account at the Garfield Bank to-day on that fifty-thousand-dollar note."
"That's my first good laugh to-day," returned Johnny. "I have no funds there."
"Gresham thought you had," said Loring quietly. "A trap was laid to make him think so, and he walked right into it."
"As soon as I have any place to keep a goat I'll get Gresham's," declared Johnny. "So he's really in on it."
"He's scared," stated Loring.
"I hope he's right," returned Johnny. "I do wish they'd let me alone, though, till Thursday, June first."
On Saturday, the twenty-ninth, and on Monday, the first of May, Johnny Gamble was compelled reluctantly to enter "flivvers" against his days' labors; and on Tuesday at two o'clock Constance called him up.
"Guilty!" he acknowledged as soon as he heard her voice. "I'm caught up with my schedule. At four o'clock I'll be ten thousand dollars behind. Everything I touch crawls right back in its shell."
"They'll come out again," she encouraged him. "I didn't call you up, as your score keeper, to tell you that from this hour you will be running in debt to yourself, but that one of your projects has come to life again."
"Which one is that?" he eagerly inquired.
"The property owned by that lady on Riverside Drive. I see by this morning's paper that the working-girls' home is not to be built. I suppose you already know it, however."
"I overlooked that scandal," he confessed. "Wasn't the building to be ugly enough?"
"This was a little obscure paragraph," she told him. "It was rather a joking item, based upon the fact that there is a great deal of ill feeling among the neighbors, who clubbed together and bought the option to prevent a building of this character from being erected. I'm so glad you didn't know about it!"
Her enthusiasm was contagious. Johnny himself was glad. It seemed like a terrific waste of time to have to wait a month before he could tell her what he thought of her; but he had to have that million!
"You're a careful score keeper," he complimented her. "I'll go right after that property. Does the item say who controls it now?"
"I have the paper before me. I'll read you the names," she returned with businesslike preparedness: "Mr. James Jameson-Guff, Mr. G. W. Mason, Mr. Martin Sheats, Mr. Edward Kettle."
"All the neighbors," he commented. "They don't like honest working-girls, I guess. That's a fine crowd of information you've handed me. I ought to give you a partnership in that million."
"You just run along or you'll be too late!" she urged him. "I'll take my commission in the five-thousand-dollar hours you donate to the Babies' Fund Fair. By the way, from whom do you suppose that option was purchased?"
"Gresham?" inquired Johnny promptly and with such a thrill of startled intensity in his tone that Constance could not repress a giggle.
"No, James Collaton," she informed him. "That's all the news. Hurry, now! Report to me, won't you, as soon as you find out whether you can secure the property? I haven't made an entry on my score board since last Wednesday night. Good-by."
"Good-by," said Johnny reluctantly; but he held the telephone open, trying to think of something else to say until he heard the click which told him that she had hung up.
Last Wednesday night! Why, that was the night he had given the dinner in celebration of his passing the quarter-of-a-million mark; and after he had taken her home from the dinner she had sat up to rule and mark that elaborate score board! Somehow his lungs felt very light and buoyant.
Collaton, though? How did he get into the deal? Suddenly Johnny remembered Val Russel's joking at the committee meeting. Gresham again!
"Loring, I don't think I can wait till June first to get after the scalps of Gresham and Collaton," he declared as he prepared to go out. "I want to soak them now."
James Jameson-Guff, so christened by his wife, but more familiarly known among his associates as Jim Guff, received Johnny with a frown when he understood his errand.
"You're too late," he told Johnny. "We've turned the option over to our wives to do with as they pleased. We're to have a swell yacht club out there now. I think that's a graft, too!"
"If you get stung again, Mr. Guff, let me know," offered Johnny, "and I'll have you a bona fide apartment-house proposition in short order."
"Nyagh!" observed Mr. Guff.
Johnny dutifully reported to his score keeper the result of his errand and, that evening, to explain it more fully he went out to her house; but he found Gresham there and nobody had a very good time.
On the following morning he saw in the papers that the Royal Yacht Club, a new organization, the moving spirit of which was one Michael T. O'Shaunessy, was to have magnificent headquarters on Riverside Drive—and he immediately went to see Mr. Guff. Mike O'Shaunessy was a notorious proprietor of road houses and "clubs" of shady reputation, and there was no question as to what sort of place the Royal Yacht Club would be.
Mr. Guff was furious about it.
"I knew it," he said. "The women have just telephoned me an authorization to send for this Jacobs blackguard and buy back the option."
"Jacobs?" inquired Johnny, "Not Abraham Jacobs?"
"That's the one," corroborated Guff. "Why, do you know him?"
"He is a professional stinger," Johnny admitted. "He stung me, and Collaton helped."
"I've no doubt of it," responded Guff. "It was a put-up job in the first place. By the way, Gamble, you used to be in partnership with Collaton yourself."
"That's true enough," admitted Johnny. "Possibly I'd better give you some references."
"Give them to the women," retorted Guff.
An hour later Johnny telephoned Guff.
"Did you repurchase the option from Jacobs?" he inquired.
"Yes!" snapped Guff, and hung up.
The facts that the De Luxe Apartments Company was hot after the property and that he himself was now four hours behind his schedule, with nothing in sight, drove Johnny on, in spite of his dismal forebodings.
Mrs. Guff he found to be a hugely globular lady, with a globular nose, the lines on either side of which gave her perpetually an expression of having just taken quinine. In view of her recent experiences she was inclined to call the police the moment Johnny stated his errand, but he promptly referred her to some gentlemen of unimpeachable commercial standing; namely, Close, Courtney, Bouncer and Morton Washer. She coolly telephoned them in his presence and was satisfied.
"You must understand, however," she said to him severely, "the only way in which we will release this option is that nothing but a first-class apartment-house, of not less than ten stories in height and with no suites of less than three thousand a year rental, shall be erected."
"I'll sign an agreement to that effect," he promptly promised.
"And how much do you offer us for the property?"
"Two hundred thousand," he returned, making a conservative guess at the amount they must have paid for the two options.
A deepening of the quinine expression told him that he had undershot the mark.
"Two hundred and ten thousand," he quickly amended.
A chocolate-cream expression struggled feebly with the quinine; and Johnny, who could translate the lines of the human countenance into dollars and cents with great accuracy, knew instantly that their two options had cost them thirty thousand dollars, and that he was offering the four ladies a profit of one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars' worth of gowns or diamonds each.
"That will be the most I can give," he still further amended. "I am prepared to write you a check at any moment."
"I think I can call a meeting at once," she informed him, and did so by telephone.
Mrs. Sheats, who came over presently, was an angular woman who kept the expression of her mouth persistently sweet, no matter what her state of mind might be; and she was very glad indeed that, so long as Miss Purry insisted on permitting a building of any sort to be erected opposite the Slosher residence, they were protecting that estimable lady in her absence by insuring a structure of dignity and class.
Mrs. Kettle, who was a placid lady of mature flesh and many teeth, and who carried ounces upon ounces of diamonds without visible effort, bewailed the innovation that Miss Purry was forcing on them, but felt a righteous glow that, under the circumstances, they were doing so nobly on behalf of Mrs. Slosher.
Mrs. Mason, who was a little, dry, jerky woman whose skin creaked when she rubbed it, whose voice scratched and whose whole personality suggested the rasp of saw-filing, was in her own confession actuated by less affectionate motives.
"I'm glad of it!" she snapped. "Mrs. Slosher is always talking about their superb river view and the general superiority of the Slosher location, the Slosher residence, the Slosher everything! I'm glad of it!"
The other ladies felt that Mrs. Mason was very catty.
At four o'clock that afternoon Johnny entered in his book:
"May third. To seven hours—nine hours behind schedule—$35,000. To Purry speculation, $210,000."
To offset this was:
"May third. To a chance, $0."
Sitting tight and watching the hands of his watch go round, with a deficit of five thousand dollars an hour piling up against him, was as hard work as Johnny Gamble had ever done; and yet he knew that, if he succumbed to impatience and went to the De Luxe Apartments Company before they came to him, he would relinquish a fifty per cent, advantage. He saw another day slipping past him, with a total deficit of sixteen hours behind his schedule—or an appalling shortage of eighty thousand dollars—when, at one o'clock on Thursday, the expected happened—and a brisk little man, with a mustache which would have been highly luxuriant if he had not kept it bitten off as closely as he could reach it, dropped in, inquired for Loring, jerked a chair as close to him as he could get it and said, in one breath: "Want to sell your river-view property?"
"Certainly," replied Loring, in whose name the property stood. "Mr. Gamble is handling that for me. Mr. Chase, Mr. Gamble."
Mr. Chase, holding to his chair, jumped up, hurried over to Johnny and once more jerked the chair close up.
"How much do you want for it?" he asked.
"Two hundred and seventy-five thousand."
"Too much. I understand it's restricted to apartment-house purposes alone?"
"Yes."
"Not less than ten stories, and a minimum rental of three thousand dollars a suite?"
"Yes."
"You can't sell it for that price with those restrictions."
"We can build on it," replied Johnny calmly.
"You won't," asserted Mr. Chase with equal conviction. "You bought it to sell. I'll give you two hundred and fifty thousand."
"No," refused Johnny quite bravely, though with a panicky feeling as he thought of that appallingly swift schedule.
"All right," said Chase. "I'll hold the offer open at that figure for forty-eight hours. I think you'll come to it."
"I doubt it," responded Johnny, smiling; but he was afraid he would.
In less than an hour he received an unexpected call from Mrs. Guff, who was in such secret agitation that she quivered like jelly whenever she breathed.
"Mr. Guff and myself have decided to take Miss Purry's river-view property off your hands, Mr. Gamble," was the glad tidings she conveyed to him, smiling to share his delight. "We can't think of letting that river view slip by us."
"I'm glad to hear it," he announced with gratification, as he thought of Mr. Chase. "Have you secured the consent of your partners in the option to waive the apartment-house requirements?"
"Oh, no!" she ejaculated, shocked that any one should think that possible. "We have decided to build the apartment-house and to live there."
"To live there!" he repeated, remembering the elaborate Guff residence.
"Yes, indeed!" she enthusiastically exclaimed. "You know the property slopes down to the river beautifully, and exquisite, private, terraced gardens could be built there. We could take the entire lower floor of the apartment building for ourselves, with a private driveway arched right through it; and we could take the first three floors of the rear part for our own use, with wonderful Venetian balconies overlooking the terraces and the river. The remaining apartments would have entrances on the two front corners, leaving us all the effect of a Venetian palace. Don't you think that's clever?"
"It is clever!" he repeated with smiling emphasis, and mentally raising Chase's ultimatum ten per cent.
"I suppose you'll want to charge us more for the property than you paid for it," she suggested with a faint hope that maybe he might not, since he had bought it so recently—and through them.
"That's what I'm in business for," he blandly acknowledged. "I can let you have the property for two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars."
"How much did you say?" she gasped.
"Two hundred and seventy-five thousand."
"Why, it's an outrage!" she puffed. "You paid only two hundred and ten thousand for it yesterday."
"I'm not telling you its cost to me yesterday, but its value to-day," he reminded her.
Mrs. Guff had helped her husband to his business success in the early days—and she had driven bargains with supply men which had made them glad when she was ill.
"You may keep the property," she wheezed. "Nobody will pay that price—not even William Slosher; and he'll buy anything if his wife pouts for it in the ridiculous French clothes she's brought back with her."
"So the Sloshers are back?" he guessed, with an understanding, at last, of her agitation.
"They came last night," she admitted, inflating with a multitude of feelings. "The most ungrateful people in the world! So far from being thankful for the time and pains and money we spent to protect them, they're viciously angry and are making threats—positive threats—that they will disgrace the entire neighborhood!"
"Do you refuse this property at two hundred and seventy-five thousand?" Mr. Gamble interestedly wanted to know.
"Certainly I do!" she emphatically declared, positive that no human being would pay that absurd increase in valuation.
"Then the price is withdrawn," he told her; and she left him, puzzling mightily over that last remark.
Johnny Gamble was a man of steady nerves, yet even he fidgeted until three o'clock for fear Mr. Slosher would not call him up. At that hour, however, Mr. Slosher called in person, accompanied by his wife. There is no need to describe Mr. Slosher, who was merely an elderly gentleman of much vigor and directness; and it is impossible to describe Mrs. Slosher, who was never twice alike, anyhow, being merely the spirit of a beautiful ever changing youth in a body of beautiful ever changing habiliments.
"What do you want for the river-view property you have just purchased?" Mr. Slosher demanded.
"I don't know," confessed Johnny, laughing. "The valuation is going up so rapidly that I can't keep track of it myself. Mrs. Guff was just in, asking the price."
Mrs. Slosher tapped the toe of a beautiful satin carriage slipper impatiently upon the floor, and a very bright red spot glowed on each cheek; but she did not say a word. She only looked at her husband. Mr. Gamble had a queer idea that her mere gaze could, on an occasion like this, burn holes through a cake of ice. Certain it is that Mr. Slosher turned quickly to her—and then, as if he had been galvanized, turned back to Johnny.
"I'll give you until to-morrow night to secure your highest offer and then I'll add five per cent, to it," he stated.
"You understand the restrictions, I suppose?" ventured Johnny.
"Perfectly. My kind neighbors have handed me a ten-story apartment-house, with a minimum rental per suite of three thousand dollars a year. I'm going to build their neighborhood ornament and fill it with high-toned niggers!"
Mrs. Slosher smiled. She was a beautiful young woman. To youth belongs much.
Johnny Gamble, caught amidships, as it were, snorted.
"Well, I don't live out there," he said.
Mr. Slosher smiled.
"That is all, I believe," he announced as he assisted Mrs. Slosher to her feet with that punctilious gallantry which defies a younger man to do it better.
At four o'clock Jim Guff called Mr. Gamble on the telephone.
"Hello, Gamble!" he hailed in an entirely new voice. "You're a robber!"
"You flatter me," returned Johnny quite comfortably. "Is there anything I can do for you in that line?"
"A whole lot," replied Guff. "I'll accept the price you gave Mrs. Guff on that river-view site."
"Too late," answered Johnny cheerfully. "I withdrew that offer before Mrs. Guff left the office. Mr. and Mrs. Slosher have been in since then."
Jim Guff's voice cracked as he hastily said:
"I'll meet any offer he makes you and tack a five-thousand-dollar bonus to it."
Johnny called up the De Luxe Apartments. Company and secured the ear of Mr. Chase.
"I withdraw my offer of two hundred and seventy-five thousand for that river-view property," he stated. "What is the best bid you will make me above that figure?"
"I'm not inclined to scramble for it," immediately claimed Mr. Chase, who was aware at the time that he was telling a point-blank lie.
"Very well, then," said Johnny, wondering how he was to get a definite figure without committing himself. "I'll have to drop you out of my calculations."
"When must you know?"
"To-morrow morning."
"You're bluffing!" charged Mr. Chase scornfully.
"I have two very earnest bidders for the property," insisted Johnny with dignity—and completed his bluff, if Chase cared to regard it that way, by hanging up his receiver.
Before he left the office he entered in his books:
"May 4. Sold; but I don't know who to or at what price. Close to schedule, though."
He entered the next day in advance:
"May 5. The Babies' Fund Fair—Holiday. Nothing doing."
"I wish I could write poetry," regretted Johnny, looking across at Constance Joy in the violet booth.
"Why don't you try it?" asked Polly Parsons, following his gaze and comprehending his desire perfectly, for she, too, was a rabid Constancite.
"I did," he confessed with a disappointed laugh. "I hadn't the nerve to be mushy enough, though—and nothing else seems to be real poetry. I got one line that listened like the goods, but I couldn't match it up: 'As I lie awake and look at the stars—' Pretty good start, eh? How do you find a rhyme for it?"
"You go down through the alphabet," Polly advised him, rather proud to be able to answer him so promptly. "Bars, cars, fars, jars—that way, you know. How I found out is that Sister Winnie writes so much poetry."
"She's a great kid," laughed Johnny. "Where is she?"
"Round here some place, giving orders to Sammy Chirp. Why are you loafing this afternoon? You're supposed to be making five thousand dollars an hour, but I don't see any chance for it here."
"It's a holiday," he retorted. "You're loafing yourself. I see it's on the program that you're to sell a quarter's worth of violets and a smile, for five dollars a throw at the boutonniere booth. Notice how I said boutonniere?"
"You got it out of a book," charged Polly disdainfully. "I called Constance over from the candy booth to take my place because a gray-haired rusher came back seven times to have me pin violets on his coat—and I couldn't smile any more. There he goes now. That's his second trip for Constance."
"This is a cruel world. I suppose it would fuss her all up if I dropped him out of a window," Johnny observed wistfully.
"Constance doesn't need help. Just watch her!" And Polly grinned appreciatively as Constance, recognizing and sorting the tottering lady-killer at a glance, took his money handed him a nosegay and a pin, and returned to the back of the booth to arrange her stock:
A huge blot of orange and a thin streak of lavender paused on the other side of the palms. Johnny wondered to see these two enemies together, but no man could know the satisfaction they took in it.
"The violet booth," read the big blot of orange, adjusting her gold lorgnette to the bridge of her globular nose and consulting her catalogue. "Friday afternoon: Polly Parsons and Mrs. Arthur Follison. That is not Mrs. Follison in the booth, is it?"
"Oh, no, Mrs. Guff!" protested the thin streak of lavender in a rasping little lavender voice. "Mrs. Follison, though not a doll-face—indeed, far from it—is of most aristocratic bearing."
"I suppose that person in the booth, then, is the adopted actress," guessed Mrs. Guff. "Any one can tell that's beauty and movement of the professional type."
Johnny looked at Polly with hasty concern, but that young lady was enjoying the joke on Constance and gripped his arm for silence.
"One can quite understand how poor Billy Parsons might become infatuated with her doll-face," returned Miss Purry pityingly, since she was herself entirely free from the crime of doll-facedness; "but that the Parsons should adopt such a common person merely because Billy died before he could marry her was inconsiderate of the rest of our class."
"The artfulness of her!" exclaimed the thick one, lorgnetting the graceful Constance with a fishy eye as the temporary flower girl joyously greeted Ashley Loring and Val Russel and Bruce Townley, pinned bouquets upon them and exchanged laughing banter with them.
"Dreadful!" agreed the shocked thin one. "Those are the very wiles by which doll-faced stage women insnare our most desirable young men."
Constance looked about just then in search of Polly, and her eyes lighted as they saw Johnny standing with her.
"Oh, Polly!" she called.
"Coming, Constance!" returned the hearty and cheery voice of Polly from just behind the critics.
The ladies in lavender and orange were still gasping when Johnny Gamble passed them with Polly. He had made up his mind about the river-front property.
Loud acclaim hailed Polly and Johnny, for where they went there was zest of life; and the boys, knowing well that Johnny never wore flowers, made instant way for him at the violet booth.
"I'll take some blue ones, lady," announced Johnny gamely, intending to wear them with defiance.
"I'll give you the nearest we have, mister," laughed Constance, and promptly decorated him.
Since this was the closest her face and eyes had ever been to him, he forgot to pay her and had to be reminded of that important duty by Polly and all the boys in unison. There was a faint evasive trace of perfume about her, more like the freshness of morning or the delicacy of starlight than an actual essence, he vaguely thought with a groping return to his poetic inclination. He felt the warmth of her velvet cheek, even at its distance of a foot away, and there seemed to be a pulsing thrill in the very air which intervened. For a startled instant he found himself gazing deep down into her brown eyes. In that instant her red lips curved in a fleeting smile—a smile of the type which needs moist eyes to carry its tenderness. It was all over in a flash, only a fragment of a second, which seemed a blissful pulsing eternity; and at its conclusion he thought that her finger quivered as it brushed his own, where he held out the lapel of his coat, and her cheek paled ever so slightly—but these were dreams, he knew.
"I'm next, I think," grated a usually suave voice which now had a decided tinge of unpleasantness; and Paul Gresham, selecting a bunch of violets from the tray, held them out toward Constance, impatient to end the all too pretty tableau.
"Next and served," Polly briskly told him; and, taking the boutonniere from his fingers, she whisked it into place and pinned it and extracted his money—all apparently in one deft operation.
"Thanks," said Gresham, blinking with the suddenness of it all and sweeping with a glance of gloomy dissatisfaction, Polly, the bouquet, Constance and Johnny. "I thought you were to be in the caramel booth, Constance."
"I'm just going back," she informed him, pausing to straighten Johnny's lapel, patting it in place and stepping back to view the result with a critical eye. It seemed to need another coaxing bend and another pat, both of which she calmly delivered.
A handsome passing couple caught Johnny's eye—a keen and vigorous-looking elderly gentleman, and Springtime come among them in the pink and white of apple blossoms—sweet and fresh and smiling; as guileless as the May itself, but competent!
"Excuse me," said Johnny, and tore himself away from the girl whose natural beauty made Mrs. Slosher an exquisite work of art. "Beg your pardon, Mr. Slosher."
Mr. Slosher turned and smiled.
"Hello, Mr. Gamble!" he greeted him, while Mrs. Slosher gave him a bright and cheery little nod. "I played old-fashioned army poker with Colonel Bouncer and Ben Courtney and Mort Washer and Joe Close last night—and the old robbers skinned me out of thirty-two dollars. They spoke of you during the game and I guess you could get backing to any amount in that crowd."
"Thanks for the tip," returned Johnny. "I may need it."
"You're going to give us our apartment-house property, aren't you?" Mrs. Slosher knew by his very appearance.
"It's only a matter of closing the deal," Johnny told her with a perfectly justifiable smile which Constance, from a distance, criticized severely. He drew an envelope from his pocket and took from it a paper which he passed to Mr. Slosher.
It was a written offer from the De Luxe Apartments Company for three hundred thousand dollars.
"That makes my offer, then—at five per cent, advance—three hundred and fifteen thousand," figured Slosher. "Is that a bargain?"
Johnny, glancing contentedly about the big inclosure, saw Jim Guff waiting impatiently for a chance to speak with him.
"It's a bargain," he agreed, and pretty little Mrs. Slosher nodded her head vehemently with innocent joy.
Gresham passed them by and tipped his hat to Mrs. Slosher, including Mr. Slosher in the greeting. A pleasant idea struck Johnny.
"You scarcely intend to build your colored apartment-house under your own name?" he suggested.
"Indeed, no!" laughed Mrs. Slosher happily. "All we wish is the result. We ask for no credit."
"Moreover," warned Mr. Slosher, "I wouldn't care to have my purpose known until after I have sold my own residence. I am a little worried, however, about the detail you suggest. No man of any consequence would injure the good will of his fellows by standing sponsor for such a venture."
"I think I know your man," stated Gamble with pleasant anticipation. "I'll tell you about him if you'll be careful not to let him or anybody else know that I recommended him."
"I can figure out sufficient reasons for that," replied Slosher. "Is he reliable?"
"He can give you security—and I suppose you had better exact it," advised Johnny. "He is the man who first secured the option from Miss Purry."
"What is his name?"
"Collaton," and Johnny gazed serenely after Gresham.
"I'll send for him in the morning," decided Mr. Slosher.
When Johnny returned to the violet booth he found there Winnie and Sammy Chirp, the latter with all his pockets and both his arms full of Winnie's purchases and personal belongings, inextricably mixed with similar articles belonging to Polly; and there was a new note of usefulness which redeemed somewhat the feebleness of his smile. Loring was helping Sammy to adjust his burdens; and Winnie, with the aid of the mirror in her vanity box, was trying the effect of violets close to her eyes. Johnny waited patiently for Loring to get through and then, despite Polly's protest, dragged him away.
"I've arranged for the first dent in Gresham and Collaton," he announced, and outlined the program which later on was carried out to the letter. "I've fixed to have some valuable property placed in Collaton's name, with Gresham as security. When that is done I want you to go to Jacobs and play a mean trick on him. Make him serve that attachment on Collaton's ostensible property. Collaton, having confessed judgment on the note, can not fight it—and Gresham will have to foot the bill."
Self-contained and undemonstrative as Loring was in public, he, nevertheless, gave way to an uncontrollable burst of laughter which humiliated him beyond measure when he discovered the attention he had attracted.
Johnny, relying like a lost mariner on Polly Parsons and Constance Joy to help him pick out a present for his only mother, approached Lofty's with a diffidence amounting to awe. In that exclusive shop he would meet miles of furbelowed femininity, but he would not have ventured unprotected into those fluffed and billowed aisles for anything short of a penance.
Being a philosopher, however, he kept his mind active in as many other directions as possible, like a child deliberately feasting upon thoughts of Santa Claus though on the way to a promised spanking.
"There's a hoodoo on this block," Johnny observed as they were caught in the traffic crush almost in front of their destination.
"Lofty and Ersten must be the hoodooers, then," laughed Polly. "Everybody else has gone away."
Johnny looked at the towering big Lofty establishment, which occupied half the block, and at the dingy little ladies' tailoring shop, down around the other corner, with speculative curiosity. About both, as widely different as they were, there was the same indefinable appearance of prosperity, as if the solid worth from within shone heavily through.
"Lofty's couldn't move and Ersten wouldn't," supplemented Constance.
"Not that Dutchman!" returned Polly, laughing again as she peered into the low dark windows of the ladies' tailoring shop. "I was in the other day, and he told me three times that he would be right there to make my walking frocks for the next thirteen years."
"He was having a quarrel with Mr. Schnitt about the light in the workroom when I was in," observed Constance, "but he told me the same thing, in his enjoyable German way, and he seemed almost angry about it."
"That's the extent of his lease," guessed Johnny shrewdly. "They're trying to get it away from him."
"I wonder why," speculated Constance.
"It's as simple as spending money," Johnny announced. "Lofty intends building an extension."
"They won't tear down Ersten's shop," Polly confidently asserted.
"They'll move him in a wheelbarrow some night," Johnny prophesied. "If I could grab his lease I could play a few hours."
Both the girls laughed at him for that speech.
"You'll be gray before the thirty-first of May," warned Polly.
"It turns anybody gray to dig up a million," agreed Johnny. "It's a good guess, though, Polly. I counted seven new white ones this morning."
"That's a strange coincidence," commented Constance, with a secretly anxious glance at his hair. "You're just seven hours behind your schedule."
Johnny shook his head.
"That schedule goes round like an electric fan," he soberly declared.
"And there's no switch," Constance reminded him.
"Gresham," Johnny suggested with a smile.
Polly cast a sidelong glance at the pretty cousin into whose family she had been adopted. The subject of Gresham was a painful one; and Johnny felt his blundering bluntness keenly.
"There isn't any Gresham," laughingly asserted Polly. "There never was any Gresham. Let's go to Coney Island to-night."
Both Constance and Johnny gave Polly a silent but sincere vote of thanks.
Willis Lofty, who continued the progressive fortune of his father by prowling about the vast establishment with a microscopic eye, approached Polly with more than a shopkeeper's alacrity.
"You promised to send for me to be your clerk the next time you came in," he chided her.
"I didn't come in this time," she gaily returned. "Mr. Gamble is the customer," and she introduced Constance and the two gentlemen. "Mr. Gamble wants to buy a silk shawl for a blue-eyed mother with gray wavy hair and baby-pink cheeks."
"There are a lot of pretty shawls here," Constance added, "but none of them seems quite good enough for this kind of a mother."
Young Lofty, himself looking more like a brisk and natty college youth who had come in to buy a gift for his own mother than the successful business man he was, glanced at the embarrassed Johnny with thorough understanding.
"I think I know what you want," he said pleasantly; and, calling a boy, he gave him some brief instructions. "We have some very beautiful samples of French embroidered silks, just in yesterday, and if I can get them away from our buyer you may have your choice. There's a delicate gray, worked in pink, which would be very becoming to a mother of that description. They're quite expensive, but, I believe, are worth the money."
"That's what I want," stated Johnny. "I understand you're going to build an extension, Mr. Lofty."
The girls gasped and then almost tittered.
Young Lofty ceased immediately to be the suave master of friendly favors and became the harassed slave of finance.
"I don't know where you secured your information," he protested.
"I'm a fancy guesser," returned Johnny with a grin.
"I wish you were right," said Lofty soberly. "We have quietly gained possession of nearly all the property in the block, but we're not quite ready to build, nevertheless."
"I can finish the sad story," sympathized Johnny. "One granite-headed ladies' tailor threatens to block the way for thirteen years."
Lofty was surprised by the accuracy of his knowledge. "I'd like to borrow your guesser," he admitted.
Johnny and the girls looked at each other with smiles of infantile glee. They were delighted that they had deduced all this while waiting for a traffic Napoleon to blow his whistle.
"Somebody's been telling," surmised Lofty. "The worst of it is, we own the original lease. Father covered the entire block, in fact."
Johnny's thorough knowledge of New York business conditions enabled him to make another good conjecture.
"Your firm has made money too fast," he remarked. "Your father hoped to build in twenty years, and you need to build in seven."
"He provided much better than that," returned Lofty in quick defense of his father's acumen. "He only allowed ten-year leases; but the one occupied by Ersten came to him with a twenty-year life on it. We've bought off all the other tenants, at startlingly extravagant figures in some cases; but Ersten won't listen."
"Did you rattle your keys?" inquired Johnny, much interested.
"As loudly as possible," returned Lofty, smiling. "I went up three steps at a time until I had offered him a hundred thousand; then I quit. Money wouldn't buy him."
"Then you can't build," innocently remarked Constance.
Willis Lofty immediately displayed his real age in his eyes and his jaws.
"I'll tear down the top part of his building and put a tunnel around him if necessary," he asserted.
"You won't like that any better than Ersten," commented Johnny. "I think I'll have to make another guess for you."
"I like your work," replied Lofty with a smile. "Let's hear it."
"All right. I guess I'll buy Ersten's lease for you."
"You'll have to find another answer, I'm afraid," Lofty hopelessly stated. "I've had a regiment of real estate men helping me devil Ersten to death, but he won't sell."
"Of course he'll sell," declared Johnny confidently. "You can buy anything in New York if you go at it right. Each deal is like a Chinese puzzle. You never do it twice alike."
"Try this one," urged Lofty. "There's a good commission in it."
"Commission? Not for Johnny!" promptly refused that young man; "I'll buy it myself, and hold you up for it."
"If you come at me too strongly I'll build that tunnel," warned Lofty.
"I'll figure it just below tunnel prices," Johnny laughingly assured him. The gray shawl with the pink relief came up just then, and all four of them immediately bought it for Johnny's sole surviving mother.
Louis Ersten, who puffed redly wherever he did not grayly bristle, met Johnny Gamble half-way. Johnny's half consisted in stating that he had come to see Mr. Ersten in reference to his lease. Mr. Ersten's half consisted in flatly declining to discuss that subject on the premises.
"Here—I make ladies' suits," he explained. "If you come about such a business, with good recommendations from my customers, I talk with you. Otherwise not."
"I'll talk any place you say," consented Johnny. "Where do you lunch?"
"At August Schoppenvoll's," replied Mr. Ersten with no hint of an intention to disclose where August Schoppenvoll's place might be. "At lunch-time I talk no business; I eat."
The speculator studied those forbidding bushy brows in silence for a moment. Beneath them, between heavy lids, glowed a pair of very stern gray eyes; but at the outward corner of each eye were two deep, diverging creases, which belied some of the sternness.
"Where do you sleep?" Johnny asked.
"I don't talk business in my sleep," asserted Mr. Ersten stoutly, and then he laughed with considerable heartiness, pleased immensely with his own joke and not noticing that it was more than half Johnny's. After all, Johnny had only implied it; he had said it! Accordingly he relented a trifle. "From four to half-past five, at Schoppenvoll's, I play skat," he added.
"Thank you," said Johnny briskly, and started for the nearest telephone directory. "I'll drop in on you."
"Well," returned Ersten resignedly, "it won't do you any good."
Johnny grinned and went out, having first made a swift but careful estimate of Ersten's room, accommodations and requirements. Outside, he studied the surrounding property, then called on a real estate firm.
At four-ten he went into the dim little basement wine-room of Schoppenvoll. He had timed this to a nicety, hoping to arrive just after the greetings were over and before the game had begun, and he accomplished that purpose; for, with the well-thumbed cards lying between them and three half-emptied steins of beer on the table, Ersten was opposite a pink-faced man with curly gray hair, whose clothes sat upon his slightly portly person with fashion-plate precision. It was this very same suit about which Ersten was talking when Johnny entered.
"Na, Kurzerhosen," he said with a trace of pathos in his guttural voice, "when you die we have no more suits of clothes like that."
"I thank you," returned the flexible soft voice of Kurzerhosen. "It is like the work you make in your ladies' garments, Ersten. When you die we shall have no more good walking clothes for our womenfolks."
"And when Schoppenvoll dies we have no more good wine," declared Ersten with conviction and a wave of his hand as Schoppenvoll approached them with an inordinately long-necked bottle, balancing it carefully on its side.
Johnny had drawn near the table now, but no one saw him, for this moment was one of deep gravity. Schoppenvoll, a tall, straight-backed man with the dignity of a major, a waving gray pompadour, and a clean-cut face that might have belonged to a Beethoven, set down the tray at the very edge of the table and slid it gently into place. An overgrown fat boy, with his sleeves rolled to his shoulders, brought three shining glasses, three bottles of Glanzen Wasser and a corkscrew.
It was at this most inopportune time that Johnny Gamble spoke.
"Well, Mr. Ersten," he cheerfully observed, "I've come round to make you an offer for that lease."
Mr. Ersten, his gnarled eyebrows bent upon the sacred ceremony about to be performed, looked up with a grunt—and immediately returned to his business. Mr. Kurzerhosen glanced round for an instant in frowning appeal. Mr. Schoppenvoll paid no attention whatever to the interruption. He gave an exhibition of cork-pulling which a watchmaker might have envied for its delicacy; he poured the tall glasses half-full of the clear amber fluid and opened the bottles of Glanzen Wasser. The three friends, Schoppenvoll now sitting, clinked their steins solemnly and emptied them. Ersten wiped the foam from his bristling gray mustache.
"About that lease I have nothing to say," he told Johnny, fixing a stern eye upon him. "I will not sell it."
The other gentlemen of the party looked upon the stranger as an unforgivable interloper.
"I'm prepared to make you a very good offer for it," insisted Johnny. "I have a better location for you, not half a block away, and I've taken an option on a long-time lease for it."
The stolid boy removed the steins. The three gentlemen poured the Glanzen Wasser into their wine.
"I will not sell the lease," announced Ersten with such calm finality that Johnny apologized for the intrusion and withdrew. As he went out, Ersten and Kurzerhosen and Schoppenvoll, in blissful forgetfulness of him, raised their glasses for the first delicious sip of the Rheinthranen, of which there were only two hundred and eighty precious bottles left in the world.
Outside, Johnny hailed a passing taxi. He called on Morton Washer, on Ben Courtney, on Colonel Bouncer, and even on Candy-King Slosher; but to no purpose. Finally he descended upon iron-hard Joe Close.
"Do you know anybody who knows Louis Ersten, the ladies' tailor?" he asked almost automatically.
"Ersten?" replied Close unexpectedly. "I've quarreled with him for thirty years. He banks with me."
"Start a quarrel for me," requested Johnny. "I've been down to look him over. I can do business with him if he'll listen."
Close smiled.
"I doubt it," he rejoined. "Ersten has just lost the coat cutter who helped him build up his business, and he's soured on everything in the world but Schoppenvoll's and skat and Rheinthranen."
"Could I learn to play skat in about a day?" inquired Johnny.
"You have no German ancestors, have you?" retorted Close.
"No."
"Then you couldn't learn it in a thousand years!"
"I have to find his weak spot," Johnny persisted. "If you'll just make him talk with me I'll do the rest."
Close shook his head and sighed.
"I'll try," he agreed, "but I feel about as hopeful as I would be of persuading a bull to sleep in a red blanket."
Johnny had caught Close as he was leaving his club for home, and they went round immediately to Schoppenvoll's. At exactly five-thirty Ersten emerged from the wine-room with Kurzerhosen.
"Hello, Louis!" hailed the waiting Close. "Jump into the taxi here, and I'll take you down to your train."
Ersten and Kurzerhosen looked at each other.
"Always we walk," declared Ersten.
"There's room for both of you," laughed Close, shaking hands with Kurzerhosen.
Ersten sighed.
"Always we walk," he grumbled, but he climbed in.
When they were started for the terminal Ersten leaned forward, with his bushy brows lowering, and glared Close sternly in the eye.
"I will not sell the lease!" he avowed before a word had been spoken.
"We know that," admitted Close; "but why?"
Ersten hesitated a moment.
"Oh, well; I tell you," he consented with an almost malignant glance in the direction of Johnny. "All my customers know me in that place."
"Your customers would find you anywhere," Close complimented him.
"Maybe they do," admitted Ersten. "My cousin, Otto Gruber, had a fine saloon business. He moved across the street—and broke up."
"It was not the same," Close assured him. "In saloons, men want to feel at home. In your business, your customers come because they get the best—and they care nothing for the shop itself."
"They like the place," asserted Ersten. "I've made a good living there for almost forty years. Why should I move?"
"Because you would be nearer Fifth Avenue," Johnny ventured to interject, and spoke to the chauffeur, who drew up to the curb. "This is the place I have in mind, Mr. Ersten."
"They come to me where I am," insisted Ersten, refusing to look, with unglazed eyes.
"You have no such show-windows," persisted Johnny.
"My customers know my goods inside."
"There's a big light gallery—twice the size of your present workrooms."
Ersten's cheeks suddenly puffed and his forehead purpled, while every hair on his head and face stuck straight out.
"My workroom is good enough!" he exploded. "I told it to Schnitt!"
"Is Schnitt your coat cutter?" asked Johnny, remembering what Constance and Close had said.
Ersten glowered at him.
"He was. Thirty-seven years he worked with me; then he tried to run my business. He is gone. Let him go!"
"He objected to the light in the workroom, didn't he?" went on the cross-examiner, carefully piecing the situation together bit by bit.
"He could see for thirty-seven years, till everybody talks about moving; then he goes crazy," blurted Ersten.
"Won't you look at this place?" he was urged. "Let me show it to you to-morrow."
"I stay where I am," sullenly declared Ersten, still angry. "We miss my train."
Close told the driver to go on. Before Ersten alighted at the terminal, Johnny made one more attempt upon him.
"If a majority of your best customers insisted that they liked the new shop better would you look at the other place?" he asked.
"My customers don't run my business either!" he puffed.
"Good-by," stated Mr. Kurzerhosen, who had been looking steadily at the opposite side of the street throughout the journey. "I thank you."
Close stared at Johnny in silence for a moment after their guests had gone.
"I told you so," he said. "You'll have to give him up as a bad job."
"He's beginning to look like a good job," asserted Johnny. "He can be handled like wax, but you have to melt him. Schnitt's the real reason. Do you know Schnitt?"
"I am happy to say I do not," laughed Close. "One like Ersten is enough."
"Somebody must lead me to him," declared Johnny. "I'm going to see Schnitt in the morning. I'd call to-night if I didn't have to be the big works at a Coney Island dinner party."
"I don't see how Schnitt can help you," puzzled Close.
"He's the tack in the tire. I can see what happened as well as if I had been there. Ersten knew he ought to move. Lofty tried to buy him and Schnitt tried to force him. Then he got his Dutch up. Schnitt left on account of it. Now Ersten won't do anything."
"You can't budge him an inch," prophesied the banker. "I know him."
"I'll coax him," stated Johnny determinedly. "There's a profit in him, and I have to have it!"