CHAPTER XIV

TAKING up his satchel, the merchant strode heavily from the room. Doubting if he had heard aright, Walton tore open the envelope and took out the bills. He spread them on the desk; he fumbled them with quivering fingers; he took out a big magnifying glass and essayed to examine them one by one, but his excitement and perturbation rendered it impossible. Dropping his hand on his call-bell, he gave a sharp ring, and Toby Lassiter came in quickly. Brushing the money toward his clerk, Walton said:

“See if they are counterfeit. By gum!”

The clerk examined them with the glass while Walton watched him with staring eyes.

“They seem to me to be all right, Mr. Walton,” Toby said, wonderingly, as he laid the bills down.

“I reckon they are—my Lord, I reckon they are!” the banker said, in his throat. “Credit it on my private account, Toby. Credit me with three—my Lord, I didn’t think—I had no idea that the dang fellow—no, I’ll attend to the money. Toby, you run out and see where he goes. He may make for a hotel, or he may—but hurry!”

Twenty minutes later Toby came back and found Walton still at his desk, the money before him; his face had taken on an ashen tinge, the eye he raised had a lacklustre expression.

“Well?” he said, eagerly.

“I missed him for the first few minutes,” the clerk said. “He was on the way to the train. I took the belt-line down. He was on the car ahead. I was just in time to see him board the Atlanta special.”

“So he’s gone?”

“Yes, he’s gone, Mr. Walton.”

The old man stared helplessly for a minute into the puzzled face of his clerk, and then he drew the pad to him on which he had written the name of his caller.

“Me ‘n’ him had a tiff,” he said. “We had a sort o’ tiff—I reckon you might call it that—after he had told me a long cock-and-bull tale about Fred reforming, and I laughed at him. I reckon I was rough. Then he threw this money at me all in a chunk to settle off the boy’s account, and said it might talk plainer than he had. Toby, it don’t look exactly like a fake. Fakes ain’t worked that way. You see, it was all up between me and him, and there wasn’t a thing he could gain by it, and yet he yanked out this wad and threw it at me like so much waste paper. He refused to say where he lives, but here’s his name. Fred wrote that the fellow he was with was a merchant, and a big one at that. I wonder if there is any way of finding out just who and what the dang fool is?”

“You say you didn’t get his address?” Toby inquired, as he helplessly stroked his colorless face and sparse mustache.

“No.” The banker uttered something like a moan of self-disgust. “He intimated that he kept it back to keep me from running the boy down. I reckon I made a big fool of myself in the presence of a man that may have unlimited capital for all I know. That’s where my judgment slipped a cog for once, I reckon. I set in to believe he was out after my money, and went a little mite over the limit. He didn’t look rich, covered with dust like he was, but he may be—he may be all Fred has claimed. Can you think of any way, Toby, to get a report on him?”

“I might take Bradstreet’s by States,” the clerk suggested, “and run through all the towns and cities far and near.”

“It would take a month to go through that big book,” Walton said, dejectedly, “and I want to know to-day, right off. If—if I’ve made a break as big as that, and—and gone and insulted a man who has befriended my boy, and one who, in fact, says he intends to provide for him liberally, why, it would be nothing but good business to make what amend lies in my power. If the boy really has built himself up, and made good connections, and the like, why, you see, Toby, I ought not to be the first—the very first—to—to damage his interests. What I said, in my rough way, you see, might have a tendency to sort o’ make this Whipple—if he is all right—think twice before helping out the son of a man who rode as high a horse as I was astride of just now. I must have a report on him, I tell you.”

“I’ll go through the book, Mr. Walton,” the clerk said. “It wouldn’t take so awful long. I would only have to run through the W’s, you know, and needn’t look in the little places. If he is in the wholesale line, he must be in a town of over ten thousand.”

“That’s a fact, that’s a fact,” Walton agreed. “I reckon he didn’t think of that when he gave me his name, though I acknowledge I kinder gouged it out of him when he was good and hot. Go bring the book here and set at my desk. I’ll not let the rest bother you. My Lord! my Lord! What a mess!”

All that afternoon the clerk bent over the huge volume with its closely printed columns on very thin paper. The closing hour came. The typewriters and clerks went home and the front door was shut, but still Toby read, patiently running the point of his pencil down column after column. Night came on, and less than half of the book still remained to be scanned.

“Go home to supper and come back,” Walton said, a strange light burning in his shrewd eyes. “I’ll meet you here. I want this thing settled. I don’t believe I could sleep with the doubt on my mind as to whether that man was fooling me or not. It is a big thing—a powerful big thing. If Fred has made himself of enough importance to have a man like that come a long distance in his behalf, why, you see, I ought to know about it, that’s all—I ought to know about it.”

“Yes, you ought to know, Mr. Walton,” Lassiter said, as he laid a blotter between the pages and reached for his hat. They went out together and walked side by side to the corner, where the clerk had to turn off.

“You sort o’ believed in Fred all along, Toby,” the banker said, tentatively—“that is, you used to talk him up to some extent.”

“I thought he was in earnest about what he wrote in that last good-bye letter, Mr. Walton. It made a deep impression on me. It sounded perfectly straight. And awhile back, when his other letter came, bringing all that cash, I was more sure than ever. Even when you said you believed it was a trick, somehow I couldn’t exactly look at it that way.”

“Well, see if you can locate this Whipple,” Walton said, and, turning off, he trudged heavily homeward through the gathering shadows.

He was on his way back to the bank about nine o’clock when he saw Toby coming toward him. The clerk was walking rapidly, swinging his long arms to and fro like pendulums.

“Well, well?” Walton exclaimed, as they met face to face on the sidewalk in the flare of a gas-light.

“I have found him!” Toby chuckled. “There is no mistake. Stephen Whipple is a whopping big wholesale grocer at Gate City, Oklahoma. He’s rated at over a million, with credit at the top notch.”

“You don’t say!” A negro laborer with a bag of flour on his shoulder was passing close by, and Walton laid his hand wamingly on the arm of his clerk and drew him slowly along.

“You don’t say!” he repeated, under his breath, as he clutched Toby’s thin arm, “and I talked to him like a dog—like a hound-dog. I did that, when he could buy and sell me over and over. I sneered at him, and just as good as called him a thief, when he was right then befriending the son I’d cast off. Say, Toby, you’ve got a sight more sense than I have; what do you think I ought to do about it?”

“I really don’t know, Mr. Walton,” Toby replied, awkwardly. “Maybe it would be a good idea for you to go out there. From the way Fred wrote, it stands to reason he’d be glad to see you, anyway, and—”

“I couldn’t do that, Toby,” Walton said, under his breath. “After the stand I took and have held all these years, I couldn’t go running after him. I could do some things, but I couldn’t do that. Besides, you see, Whipple would know we’d looked up his standing, and think I’d come because he was rich. But, say, I have an idea, Toby. Don’t you think you could get on the train and go out there and take a look around?”

“Why, yes, if you advise it, Mr. Walton.”

“And you could go and hang about, in a quiet, know-nothing way, without letting Fred see you, I reckon?”

“Easy enough, Mr. Walton, in a bustling place like that.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell you what you do. Pack your grip to-night, and take the eight-thirty train in the morning. Put up at some out-of-the-way hotel, and lie low and pick up what information you can. Don’t go about Whipple’s place of business; if Fred saw you, it would spoil it all. I’ll defray your expenses. You deserve a trip, anyway. Of course, even if the boy has made such a good, comfortable nest for himself out there, that woman business is still hanging over him, and he wouldn’t feel exactly like facing Stafford folks right now. But I reckon he’s been doing an honest man’s part by her along with his rise. He’s been providing for her and the child pretty well, I’ll be bound. And in case he does come back, even on a visit, we’ll help him smooth over the matter as far as is in our power. He ain’t the first young chap that’s let his blood get the upper hand. Some of the great men of history have made like slips along at the start. Yes, we’ll try to manage that some way. We might even get her and her mother to move off somewhere. I don’t know—I only say it might be done. Folks in a plight of that sort will do most anything when they are paid, and it looks like Fred won’t go a-begging. Now, good-bye, Toby. You’ve got a job of detective work before you, but I believe you’ll be smart enough to put it through.”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. Walton,” the clerk said. “Goodbye.”