The slip of paper was Eben Grillage’s personal cheque on a Chicago bank for the round sum of one hundred thousand dollars.

[40]

IV An Honorable Discharge

DAVID VALLORY lost little time in crossing the square from the St. Nicholas to the bank corner; in point of fact, he was boyish enough to run. In the bank he found his father relocking the vault after having given the frightened farmer his money.

“Is your heart-action still pretty good, Dad?” he asked. “No high blood pressure, or anything like that, is there?”

“No, David. If I were as sound in mind as I am in body——”

But David would not let him finish. “Take a look at this and tell the blues to go hang,” he laughed, fishing the cheque of salvation out of an inner pocket.

Adam Vallory held the strip of paper up to the electric vault light, saw the figures and the signature, and dropped back into a chair, shaken and tremulous.

“David!” he gasped reproachfully. “Did you tell him?”

[41]“I did. Because it was evident that you hadn’t told him, I tried my best to dodge; but it was no manner of use. When Mr. Eben Grillage goes after a thing, he is not to be denied. He nearly bit my head off when he saw that I was trying to keep something from him. He said I was to give you that piece of paper with his love; that was after he’d ordered me to call Tom Judson on the ’phone for him and had told Judson that the Middleboro Security was his bank, and that he must draw through you for the money to pay for the shipment of scrapers and dump-cars. He said it so that the people standing around in the hotel lobby couldn’t help hearing and knowing that he is backing you. Isn’t that just about the finest thing you ever heard of?”

[41]

Adam Vallory was shaking his head dubiously.

“It is too fine, David; the obligation, even from an old friend like Eben.... It’s crushing. But we must consider it as a loan, no matter how he regards it. Yet I don’t see how we shall ever be able to pay it back.”

The young man had perched himself upon the bookkeeper’s high stool, and he had his answer ready.

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