The cashier closed his mouth with a click. "What the--!" he muttered.
"Next!" said George B. Richards, cheerfully. He opened envelope number two and pulled out another ten-thousand-dollar bill. One after another he opened the letters until he had laid in a neat pile on his desk ten ten-thousand-dollar notes.
"The letters of introduction are from the Treasury Department," said Richards, laughing. "Now let us see whom the card is from."
"I don't care whom the card is from. I know the man is crazy," said Gourley, in the defiant tone of one who expects not logic, but contradiction. "It is as plain as the nose on your face."
"Maybe they are counterfeit," teased Richards; he knew they were not.
The cashier snatched one from the desk, looked at the vignette of Jackson, and examined the back. "It's good," he said, gloomily.
Richards opened the eleventh envelope and took out a card.
"From Amos Kidder, of the Evening Planet," he told Gourley, and read aloud:
_Dear George,--The bearer, Mr. James B. Robison, of Paris, France, a friend of Smiley, our correspondent there, asked me to recommend some highly intelligent stock-brokers. I, of course, at once thought of you. Deal with him as you do with_
"Maybe it's a set of those French books that are awful until you've signed the contract and Volume I. comes, and they are not awful at all. Those fellows," said the cashier, indignantly, "will do anything to get your money."
"You forget I've got his," suggested Richards.
"That's a new one on me, I admit," said the cashier; "but I'll bet a ten-spot--"
"I'll have no gambling in this office! Send in Mr. Robison; and if Kidder should happen in, tell him I'd like to see him."
The waxed-mustached man, preceded by Otto, the moon-faced clerk, entered the private office of Mr. George B. Richards, who rose and smiled pleasantly even as his keen eyes quickly inventoried Mr. Robison.
"Mr. Richards?" twanged the stranger. That Yankee voice issuing from between those unmistakably French mustaches made Richards start; and yet the vague atmosphere of disquietude and suspicion that the ten letters of introduction had created seemed to be dispelled by the man's Yankee twang. It was so genuinely down-east that it humanized Mr. Robison and made his eccentricity less eccentric. Also, the eyes gleamed not with the fire of insanity, but with a great earnestness.