Five Thousand an Hour: How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress Part 41

Gresham made an attempt at that point to prove himself a man, but Loring restrained him from that absurd idea with one hand while he raised his hat with the other.

"Where next?" asked the driver huskily.

"The finest place for a kidnapping is Forty-second and Broadway,"

answered Johnny with his mind made up.

"I'll take you all the way," almost begged the chauffeur. "You're the only sport that ever handed me enough for a night ride, and I'd like to hand you good service."

"I don't know who else pays you," laughed Johnny, and his chauffeur, with a mighty respect for his fare, drove to Forty-second and Broadway, where Johnny paid him.

They walked to Johnny's apartments, and on their arrival Johnny produced the bonds, spreading them out on his table.

"About the first thing is to sign these," he suggested to Gresham.

That abused young man, who had been in the constant expectation of hearing himself yell for the police, but had been as constantly disappointed, had walked along like a gentleman; now, at last, he found his voice.

"This is an outrage!" he exclaimed.

"I know it," agreed Johnny. "It's even high-handed. Here's a fountain-pen."

"I refuse," maintained Gresham. "Why should I a.s.sign my own personal property to you?"

"Because your personal property is mine," Johnny informed him. "I don't owe you any explanation, Gresham, but I'll make one. You helped Birchard forge his power of attorney from the Wobbles brothers, and you were with him in taxi 23406 when he collected my million from the First National. You were seen again that night with Birchard on the Boston Post Road, and from then on Birchard dropped off the earth; but you didn't. You got Jacobs to buy you these bonds, and Jacobs is a piker.

He confessed and begged for mercy. You're through."

Gresham held doggedly to the thought that never, under any circ.u.mstances, must he admit a criminal action; for such a thing was so far beneath him.

"I deny everything that you have said," he declared.

Johnny had a sudden frantic picture of this man touching the hand of Constance, and he leaned across the table until his face was quite close to Gresham's. The muscles in his jaws grew uncomfortably nervous.

"Did you ever hear of the third degree?" he inquired. "Well, I'm going to put you through it."

"The third degree?" faltered Gresham. "I don't quite understand what you mean."

"You don't?" replied Johnny. "It begins this way"--and the watchful Loring suddenly hung on Johnny's arm with his full weight.

"Don't!" implored Loring.

"I'm going to smash his head in!" husked Johnny, quivering with an anger to which he had not given way for years.

"Wait a minute!" pleaded Loring, pulling on him with all his strength.

"Wait, I say! I want to help you, but you're in wrong. Listen to me"--and he drew his reluctant client away from the table. "I've no objections to your thrashing Gresham and I'd like to be your proxy, but you'd better put it off. If you compel Gresham by force to sign these bonds he can repudiate that action under protection of the court and it will work against you."

Johnny Gamble controlled himself with an effort.

"They're my bonds," he persisted with his thoughts, however, more on Constance than on business. "He'll sign them or I'll smash him."

Gresham, speaking above his panic of physical cowardice with a tremulous effort, interpolated himself into the argument.

"I'll sign," he promised with stiff lips, and tried to write his name on the cover of a magazine. The scrawl was so undecipherable that he rose from the table and walked up and down the room in acute distress, holding his right hand at the wrist and limbering it. "If I sign," he presently bargained as he came to the table, "I must be promised freedom from the distaste of a personal encounter."

Loring hastily complied, and Johnny, after having been prodded into a recognition of the true situation, agreed with a disgusted snarl.

Gresham, with nerves much restored and a smile beginning to appear upon his now oily features, carefully a.s.signed each bond, and then, secure in Johnny's promise, which he accepted at the par value all men gave it, stood up and shook his finger warningly.

"A signature obtained under coercion is not worth the ink it took to scrawl it," he triumphantly declared, having taken his cue from Loring.

"Any court in America will set aside this action."

"I know it," Johnny unexpectedly coincided. "I'm going to give you a chance at it," and grabbing his telephone he called up Central Police and asked for an officer to be sent to his rooms.

"Now, Loring, you disappear," directed Johnny briskly as he gathered up the bonds. "I may have to dismiss you as my lawyer, but as my friend you can hand these bonds to somebody who will lose them."

"As your lawyer I'd have to call you a blooming idiot," declared Loring, "but as your friend I don't think Gresham will raise any question about the bonds. They're yours, Johnny; but, nevertheless, I'll forget where they are by the time the police come."

Gresham had been struggling with an intolerable lump in his throat.

"Gamble!" he abjectly pleaded, "I've signed the bonds. I admit that they're yours. You're not going to have me arrested?"

Johnny turned on him with the sort of implacable enmity which expresses itself in almost breathless quietness.

"I'm going to send you to the penitentiary for a thousand years," he promised.

CHAPTER XXIV

IN WHICH JOHNNY DEMANDS SPOT CASH AT ONCE

Seven-thirty the next morning found Johnny Gamble listening, in awed curiosity, to an insistent telephone bell. Gradually it dawned on him that he must have left a call, and plodding into the bath-room he mechanically turned on the cold water, reflecting dully that this was a cruel world. Suddenly it came to him with a rush that this thirty-first of May was to be the busiest of his life! He had to have a million dollars before four o'clock!

At seven-forty-five he was out of his bath-tub. At eight he was gulping hot coffee. At eight-fifteen he was stepping out of the elevator with an apple core in his hand.

At the curb in front of his door he found a long gray torpedo touring car throbbing with impatience, and at the wheel sat a plump young lady in a vivid green bonnet and driving coat. In the tonneau sat a more slender young lady all in gray, except for the brown of her eyes and the pink of her cheeks and the red of her lips.

Johnny's Baltimore straw hat came off with a jerk.

"Out after the breakfast rolls?" he demanded as he shook hands with them quite gladly.

"No, indeed; hunting a job," responded Polly. "This machine and the services of its chauffeur and messenger girl are for rent to you only, for the day, at the price of a nice party when you get that million. We have to be in on the excitement."

"Hotel Midas," Johnny crisply directed, and jumped into the tonneau, whereupon the chauffeur touched one finger to her bonnet, and the machine leaped forward.

"You're lazy," chided Constance. "We've been waiting twenty minutes. We were afraid you might be gone, but they told us that you had not yet come down."

"If I'd known you were coming I'd have been at the curb before daybreak," grinned Johnny. "You're in some rush this morning."