"I wish you'd let me get your hat ironed, Mr. Tutt," remarked Miss
Wiggin. "It would cost you only fifty cents."
"That's all you know about it, my dear," he answered. "More likely it
would cost me a hundred thousand dollars."
* * * * *
Mr. Tobias Greenbaum, of Scherer, Hunn, Greenbaum & Beck, carefully
placed his cigar where it would not char his Italian Renaissance desk
and smoothed out the list which Mr. Elderberry, the secretary of The
Horse's Neck Extension Copper Mining Company, handed to him. The list
was typed on thin sheets; of foolscap and contained the names of
stockholders, but as it had lain rolled up in the bottom of Mr.
Elderberry's desk for five years without being disturbed it was inclined
to resist the gentle pressure of Mr. Greenbaum's fingers.
Mr. Greenbaum glanced sharply round the plate-glass lake that separated
him from the other directors of Horse's Neck, rather as if he had
detected his associates in a crime.
"Isaacs says," he announced in an arrogant, almost insulting tone,
though below the surface he was an entirely genial person, "that the new
vein in the Amphalula runs into the west drift of Horse's Neck almost to
where we quit work in Number Nine five years ago."
"If it does it will make it a bonanza property," emphatically declared
his partner, Mr. Scherer, a dolichocephalous person with very black hair
and thin bluish cheeks.
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