The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [73]
“Maybe there are covered carpet tacks,” observed his friend, with but languid interest.
“What do I care?” rejoined Mr. Wallingford. “A man can always get a patent, and that’s all I need, even if it’s one you can throw a cat through. The company can fight the patent after I’m out of it. You wouldn’t expect me to fasten myself down to the grease-covered details of an actual manufacturing business, would you?”
“Not any!” rejoined the dark one emphatically. “You’re all right, J. Rufus. I’d go into your business myself if I wasn’t honest. But on the level, what do you expect to do here?”
“Organize the Universal Covered Carpet Tack Company. I’ll begin to-morrow morning. Give me the list you couldn’t use.”
“Don’t get in bad from the start,” warned Mr. Daw. “Tackle fresh ones. The particular piece of Roquefort, though, that fooled me into a Pullman compartment and kept me grinning like a drunken hyena all the way here, was a pinhead by the name of Edward Lamb. When Eddy fell for an inquiry about Billion Strike gold stock, he wrote on the firm’s stationery, all printed in seventeen colors and embossed so it made holes in the envelopes when the cancellation stamp came down. From the tone of Eddy’s letter I thought he was about ready to mortgage father’s business to buy Billion Strike, and I came on to help him do it. Honest, J. Rufus, wouldn’t it strike you that Lamb was a good name? Couldn’t you hear it bleat?”
Mr. Wallingford shook silently, the more so that there was no answering gleam of mirth in Mr. Daw’s savage visage.
“Say, do you know what I found when I got here?” went on Blackie still more ferociously. “I found he was a piker book-keeper, but with five thousand dollars that he’d wrenched out of his own pay envelope, a pinch at a clip; and every time he takes a dollar out of his pocket his fingers creak. His whole push is like him, too, but I never got any further than Eddy. He’s not merely Johnny Wise—he’s the whole Wise family, and it’s only due to my Christian bringing up that I didn’t swat him with a brick during our last little chatter when I saw it all fade away. Do you know what he wanted me to do? He wanted me to prove to him that there actually was a Billion Strike mine, and that gold had been found in it!”
Mr. Wallingford had ceased to laugh. He was soberly contemplating.
“Your Lamb is my mutton,” he finally concluded, pressing his finger tips together. “He’ll listen to a legitimate business proposition.”
“Don’t make me fuss with you, J. Rufus,” admonished Mr. Daw. “Remember, I’m going away to-night,” and he arose.
Mr. Wallingford arose with him. “By the way, of course I’ll want to refer to you; how many addresses have you besides the Billion Strike? A mention of that would probably get me arrested.”
“Four: the Mexican and Rio Grande Rubber Company, Tremont Building; the St. John’s Blood Orange Plantation Company, 643 Third Street; the Los Pocos Lead Development Company, 868 Schuttle Avenue, and the Sierra Cinnabar Grant, Schuttle Square, all of which addresses will reach me at my little old desk-room corner in 1126 Tremont Building, Third and Schuttle Avenues; and I’ll answer letters of inquiry on four different letter-heads. If you need more I’ll post Billy Riggs over in the Cloud Block and fix it for another four or five.”
“I’ll write Billy a letter myself,” observed J. Rufus. “I’ll need all the references I can get when I come to organize the Universal Covered Carpet Tack Company.”
“Quit kidding,” retorted Mr. Daw.
“It’s on the level,” insisted J. Rufus seriously. “Let’s go down to dinner.”
There were twenty-four applicants for the position before Edward Lamb appeared, the second day after the initial insertion of the advertisement which had been designed to meet his eye alone. David Jasper,