Were already informed our Mr. Bowman will report to you in time for sale

Since you think Bowman's presence might hurt negotiations he will not come look to you to bid us in at lowest possible figure

Up to one hundred and fifty thousand if bidding goes above that wire for further instructions

Yes keep all under fifty thousand for your fee

Business! All pure business! The United Sales Recording Machine Company of New Jersey was being held up, and it was good business for them to see that they were mulcted of as little as possible. Wallingford rather admired them for it. Since the property was at open sale they had as much right to buy it as he had. He read these telegrams over and over in profound content. He had foreseen them. Moreover, he had read not only Maylie's intention, but his plan and every detail of it, and for him he felt no admiration whatever. Maylie was too clumsy.

There was a small serving table in the dining room, and Wallingford carried that in to the sleeper's bedside. Upon this he spread the four telegrams in neat order, and weighted them down with _empty gla.s.ses_ for Mr. Maylie's absorbed study if he should happen to awaken. Next he drew his favorite chair into that room, and placed it at the opposite end of the serving table. He put upon this the champagne bottle and his own gla.s.s, and lighting a big and extremely black cigar he sat down to watch his erstwhile comrade, for he was taking no chances. Whenever he felt himself nodding or letting that cigar lax in his fingers he took a tiny sip of the champagne. Sometimes he went in and held his head under the cold water faucet.

At the end of the first hour sleep threatened to overcome him, in spite of all that he could do, and going into the bathroom he undressed and took a cold shower. That refreshed him exceedingly, and the feel of cool, fresh linen upon him brightened him still more, for in his personal habits he was clean as a cat. It crossed his mind once or twice to send down and get newspapers, but he knew that the least strain upon his eyes would send him to sleep quicker than anything else. The second hour pa.s.sed; the third, then the fourth one dragged wearily by. At the beginning of the fifth he began to stumble as he walked from room to room to keep awake, but never for more than five minutes at a time did he let that sleeping man out of his sight.

It seemed an eternity until the telephone bell rang in the parlor with startling insistence. With a glance of triumph toward the bed, he hurried in to obey the welcome call.

"Yes, this is Wallingford," he answered huskily. "How about it?...

Good. How much?... What? All right, come straight up."

He stood scratching his head and trying to think for a few minutes, endeavoring to recall a certain number that he had in mind. Then he turned to the telephone book and fumbled through its leaves, backward and forward. His thumbs and fingers were like clubs. They had no feeling whatever. It took him whole minutes to separate two leaves from each other, swaying upon his feet and muttering to himself, but finally he found the name he wanted and put in the call. Slowly and with tremendous effort he delivered his message, then slapped the receiver on the hook and staggered back to his chair. His fight against sleep for the next ten relaxed minutes was like a drowning man's fight for life, but he conquered, and when, a few moments later, there came a knock at his door, he was able to open it briskly.

"Hee-avings hee-elp us!" exclaimed Blackie Daw when he came in. "What a bat you've been on! Have you looked at yourself, J. Rufus?" and kicking the door shut he walked his friend up in front of the mantel mirror.

Wallingford focused his attention upon his own puffed face, on the swelled and reddened eyelids, on the bloodshot eyes, and laughed hoa.r.s.ely.

"It's worth it," he declared. "I win over one hundred and fifty thousand clean, cold simoleans. But how did you come to have to pay eight thousand for the patents?"

"Klug," replied Blackie. "I thought for a minute he'd top my pile. He'd raised a little money some place, but he spent four thousand of it bidding in some machinery. It never flashed on him that the patents would have to be sold, too, and he nearly took a fit when he found it out. Game, though. He bid 'em up to his last cent. We had been going in five-hundred-dollar raises until it got up to six thousand. That was Mr.

Klug's last bid, for I piled two thousand square on top of it and tried to look like I could go two thousand at a jump for the next two hours, and then Klug laid down."

"Eight thousand and four thousand. That's twelve thousand, and the bank's note is ten," figured Wallingford with painful slowness. "The costs will run about two hundred, and that lets the company have eighteen hundred dollars to divide among the partners. Why, say, Blackie, I get one twelfth of that! There's about a hundred and fifty dollars coming to me. Suppose we go over and get it."

He laughed, but even as he did so he swayed and caught at a chair, and his eyelids dropped.

"I've got to keep up now until we get into a Pullman," he mumbled with halting effort. "Sleep? I'll sleep all the way to New Jersey. Did you arrange to pay for the patents?"

"Did I?" triumphed Mr. Daw. "Trust your uncle for that. Say, J. Rufus, what'll you give me to transfer them over to you?"

Wallingford turned to his friend a countenance that was almost ferocious in its sudden alertness.

"I'll give you twenty minutes to do it in," he said with a growl.

"There's a lawyer on the way here now, and I can have a policeman here in two minutes. You know you jumped bail in this town, don't you?"

Mr. Daw was shocked.

"There's no need for you to be so ugly about it, J. Rufus," he protested. "I wouldn't take a cent away from you."

"Wouldn't you!" sneered J. Rufus. "Do you know why? I'd never give you a chance. Let me show you the last man that tried to do me up," and he led the way into the apartment where Mr. Maylie still lay in profound slumber.

Mr. Daw grinned.

"He makes you look perfectly sober," he confessed; "but what are those papers on the table?"

Mr. Wallingford laughed quite naturally this time.

"Poor b.o.o.b!" he said. "He just lost forty thousand, and those telegrams are his fee."

CHAPTER XVIII

THE TOWN OF BATTLESBURG FINDS A PRIVATE RAILROAD CAR IN ITS MIDST!

Sleep, blessed sleep! Desperately Wallingford fought it off until the lawyer had arrived and the necessary doc.u.ments had been signed, and then, more dead than alive, he allowed himself to be bundled into a cab.

"Now, J. Rufus," said Blackie Daw as he jumped in beside him, "we have your affairs all wound up and a red ribbon tied around them, so let's 'tend to Happy Horace. I'm a bridegroom! Congratulate muh."

"Huh?" grunted J. Rufus, and immediately there followed another succession of unintelligible sounds. Wallingford was snoring.

It was precisely twenty-four hours before Mr. Daw could convey this important information to his friend and make him understand it, and it was not until they had arrived in Jersey City that J. Rufus, still dull from his nerve-racking experience, was normal enough to ask:

"Who's the lucky lady?"

"The Star of Morning and the Queen of Night," responded Blackie with vast enthusiasm. "The one best bet of blazing Broadway. The sweetest peach in the orchard of joy. The fairest blossom in Cupid's garden.

The--"

"It's a fine description," interrupted Wallingford. "I'd be able to pick her out any place from it; but what was her name before she shortened it?"

"You want to know too quick," complained Blackie. "You ought to have waited till I explained something more about her; but you always were an impatient cuss, and I'll tell you. Her name was and is, upon the bill-boards and in the barber-shop windows, Violet Bonnie, whose exquisite voice and perfect figure--"

"Is _she_ divorced again?" once more interrupted Wallingford.

"Last week," answered Blackie with no abatement of his enthusiasm, "and Happy Horace happened to be on the spot. I was introduced to her over at Shirley's the night she was celebrating the granting of her decree, and I had so much money with me it made my clothes look lumpy. She took an awful shine to that bank roll; not so much the diameter of it but the way I rolled it. It never rested, and by two in the morning she had transferred her affections from the swiftly flowing mezuma to me. At four o'clock G. M. we waded out from among the ocean of empties and, attended by a party so happy they didn't care whether it was day before yesterday or day after to-morrow, we took pa.s.sage in seaworthy taximeters and floated to the Little Church Around the Corner, where the bright and shining arc light of musical comedy became Mrs. Violet Bonnie Daw. It was a case of love at first sight."

"For how long have you secured a lease?" inquired Wallingford.

"I don't know," replied Blackie reflectively. "She was married the first time for three years, the second for two and the third for one.

According to those figures Number Four would have a right to look forward to about six months of married bliss."

"I never was drunk for six months at a time in my life," reflected Wallingford, "but I can see how it could happen. When it's all over, come around to me and I'll lead you to a sanitarium. In the meantime, when am I to have a chance to congratulate the lady?"

"Right away. She is now awaiting yours truly with quite yearning yearns.

You know, J. Rufus, your urgent telegram interrupted the howlingest honeymoon that ever turned the main stem into the Great Purple Way.

Here's the address. Come over as soon as you have held up the United people, and interrupt us. If you don't find us at home, just go charter a car and roll up and down the avenue until you see the speediest automobile cab outdoors. Chase that, because it's us."

When he called at two o'clock on the following afternoon, however, after having seen Mr. Priestly to their mutual satisfaction, he found them at home just preparing for breakfast, and blinking at the gray world through the mists of a champagne headache. He found Violet Bonnie Daw, seen thus intimately, to be an extremely blond person with a slight tendency toward _embonpoint_, but her eyes were very blue, and her complexion, even without a make-up, very clear, able even to dominate her charming morning gown of a golden shade that exactly matched her hair. True, if one looked closely there were already traces of coming crow's-feet about the eyes, but one must not look closely; and her very real cordiality made amends for any such slight drawbacks.

"So you're my husband's old pal!" she exclaimed as she shook hands with him warmly. Then she surveyed him from head to foot with an expert apprais.e.m.e.nt. "You look like a good sport all right," she concluded.