Aunt Grace had worried about Jim’s little cold, and the distant mouse she thought she heard, and the silver chest, and Lucile’s dangerous looking new horse, until all these topics had failed, when she detected the unmistakable click of a switch-button near by. It must be in Gail’s suite. Hadn’t the child retired yet? She lay quite still pondering that mighty question for ten minutes, and then, unable to rest any longer, she slipped out of bed and across the hall. There was no light coming from under the doors of either the boudoir or the bedroom, so Aunt Grace peeped into the latter apartment, then she tiptoed softly away. Gail, in her cascade of pink flufferies, was at the north window, kneeling, with her earnest face upturned to one bright pale star.
The map of the United States in Edward E. Allison’s library began, now, to develop little streaks of red. They were not particularly long streaks, but they were boldly marked, and they hugged, with extraordinary closeness, the pencil mark which Allison had drawn from New York to Chicago and from Chicago to San Francisco. There were long gaps between them, but these did not seem to worry him very much. It was the little stretches, sometimes scarcely over an inch, which he drew with such evident pleasure from day to day, and now, occasionally, as he passed in and out, he stopped by the big globe and gave it a contemplative whirl. On the day he joined his far western group of little marks by bridging three small gaps, he received a caller in the person of a short, well-dressed, old man, who walked with a cane and looked half asleep, by reason of the many puffs which had piled up under his eyes and nearly closed them.
“I’m ready to wind up, Tim,” remarked Allison, offering his caller a cigar, and lighting one himself. “When can we have that Vedder Court property condemned?”
“Whenever you give the word,” reported Tim Corman, who spoke with an asthmatic voice, and with the quiet dignity of a man who had borne grave business responsibilities, and had borne them well.
“You’re sure there can’t be any hitch in it.”
“Not if I say it’s all right,” and the words were Tim’s only reproof. His tone was perfectly level, and there was no glint in his eyes. Offended dignity had nothing to do with business. “Give me one week’s notice, and the Vedder Court property will be condemned for the city terminal of the Municipal Transportation Company. Appraisement, thirty-one million.”