“Krutzmacht treated me like most men treat women they’ve got cheap. I had no reason to be loyal to him, as I told you.”
“Unless,” Brainard suggested lightly, “you happened to be his wife!”
Miss Walters ignored the implication and continued explanatorily:
“When we lost you at Vera Cruz, and the railroad men I was working for had no more use for me, I was down and out. There didn’t seem to be anything for anybody from Krutzmacht’s money except what the Germans got and you! So I went into the show that I told you of. But it seems there was a good deal more property I didn’t know about—he was always close mouthed. You were clever enough to find that mine and keep it for yourself. . . . It wasn’t until you struck New York that anybody heard about it. Then the papers and the magazines were full of it and of you and of all the money you were throwing away on a theater.”
“Publicity is one of the penalties of success,” Brainard observed.
“You don’t want any more trouble?” she suggested in a gentler tone than she had previously used.
“Don’t mind trouble,” Brainard retorted quickly.
At this point Hollinger and Farson returned to the room. Hollinger looked quickly at the position of the two, smiled placidly, and helped himself to another cigar from the box on the table.
“Miss Walters persists in acting all the time,” Brainard replied. “She thinks this is a sequel to the play and wants me to hand over to her a lot of money.”
“Sometimes,” Hollinger observed sententiously, “that’s the easiest way to square things, isn’t it?”
Brainard looked at the fight-trust man in astonishment. Was he an accomplice in a vulgar blackmail game?
“Half a loaf when no part of the loaf is really yours is always more enjoyable than a legal scrimmage over the whole loaf, it seems to me.”
Hollinger threw himself into an easy-chair, lighted his cigar carefully, and beamed at Brainard.
“Did it ever occur to you, my young friend,” he began, “that we four are, so to speak, all in the same boat? We are all adventurers—of that noble company of gentlemen and lady adventurers in life—to paraphrase the quaint motto of the Hudson Bay Company. Now in the course of the complicated tissue of adventure that happens to have brought us three together from very unlike walks in life, you”—he thrust the glowing point of his cigar towards Brainard,—“have proved to be the Star. You’re It! You hold the bag, so to speak. You seem to have shared some of its golden contents with our young friend here who wants to write plays, as he tells me. I do not happen to want anything for myself. I am perfectly disinterested in this case,—fortunately can afford to be. For I have other and sufficiently fat fish frying in my own little pan. So I can play the gracious rôle of Wisdom. . . . Why not be generous to the lady who lost in this matter of the old Dutchman’s millions—you can afford it—and nothing becomes a young unmarried Idealist more than princely generosity with other people’s dollars.”