why you want to publish my disgrace." 

 "You deserve it," chuckled the colonel. "It won't hurt for Johnny to know it though. He's the shrewdest young man of my acquaintance, and he might be able to figure a way out of your dilemma for you." 

 "I might even be able to make some money out of it myself," Johnny frankly acknowledged. 

 "Jump right in and welcome, young man," invited Courtney. "If you can pull me out whole I don't care how much you make." 

 "We'll consider that a bargain," offered Gamble. 

 "All right," returned Courtney, smiling. "We'll shake hands on it in the good old-fashioned way." And they did so, under Colonel Bouncer's earnestly interested approval. 

 "Tell him your troubles," urged the colonel. "If it were my case, Ben, I'd be yelling for help as long as I had breath in my body." 

 "It's very simple," explained Courtney. "I imagined that a big hotel at the new terminal station would be the best investment in New York. I spoke to a number of my financially active friends about it and they were enthusiastic. I had verbal promises in one day's work of all the money necessary to finance the thing. I found that the big vacant plot across from the station was held at a prohibitive price. Mallard & Tyne had, with a great deal of labor, collected the selling option on the adjoining block, fronting the terminal. They held it at two and a quarter millions. My friends, at an infernal luncheon, authorized me, quite orally, indeed, to secure the cheaper site without a moment's delay, especially since it was rumored that Morton Washer was contemplating the erection of a hotel upon that very spot." 

 "I see the finish," laughed Johnny. "Mad with fear, you dashed right down there and broke yourself! Then Union Pacific fell off an eighth; they killed an insurrecto in Mexico; the third secretary of a second-rate life-insurance company died and Wall Street put crape on the door. All your friends got cold feet and it was the other fellow who had urged you to buy that property. The colonel says you dropped a hundred and twenty-five thousand. That's a stiff option. Can't you get any of it back?" 

 "Get it back!" groaned Courtney. "They're after the balance. It wasn't an option—it was a contract. If I don't pay the remainder at the end of the ninety days they'll sue me; and I have several million dollars' worth of property that I can't hide." 

 Prev. P 34/152 next