The Price | Page 7

canna remember
the time when I knew what it was to be on short commons, mysel'," he
said; and the unconscious lapse into the mother idiom was a measure of
his perturbation. "Take this, now, and be off wi' you, and we'll say no
more about it."
The invader of privacies glanced at the clock in his turn and shook his
head.
"You are merely trying to gain time, and you know it, Mr. Galbraith.
My stake in this game is much more than a handful of charity silver;
and I don't do you the injustice to believe that you hold your life so
cheaply; you who have so much money and, at best, so few years to
live."
The president put the little heap of coins on the desk, but he did not
abandon the struggle for delay.
"What's your price, then?" he demanded, as one who may possibly
consider a compromise.
"One hundred thousand dollars--in cash."
"But man! ye're clean daft! Do ye think I have----"
"I am not here to argue," was the incisive interruption. "Take your pen
and fill out a check payable to your own order for one hundred
thousand dollars, and do it now. If that door opens before we have
concluded, you are a dead man!"

At this Andrew Galbraith saw that the end was nigh and gathered
himself for a final effort at time-killing. It was absurd; he had no such
balance to his personal credit; such a check would not be honored; it
would be an overdraft, and the teller would very properly-- In the midst
of his vehement protests the stranger sprang out of his chair, stepped
back a pace and raised his weapon.
"Mr. Galbraith, you are juggling with your life! Write that check while
there is yet time!"
A sound of subdued voices came from the anteroom, and the
beleaguered old man stole a swift upward glance at the face of his
persecutor. There was no mercy in the fierce blue eyes glaring down
upon him; neither compassion nor compunction, but rather madness
and fell murder. The summons came once again.
"Do it quickly, I say, before we are interrupted. Do you hear?"
Truly, the president both heard and understood; yet he hesitated one
other second.
"You will not? Then may God have mercy----"
The hammer of the levelled pistol clicked. Andrew Galbraith shut his
eyes and made a blind grasp for pen and check-book. His hands were
shaking as with a palsy, but the fear of death steadied them suddenly
when he came to write.
"Indorse it!" was the next command. The voices had ceased beyond the
partition, and the dead silence was relieved only by the labored strokes
of the president's pen and the tap-tap of the typewriter in the adjacent
anteroom.
The check was written and indorsed, and under the menace of the
revolver Andrew Galbraith was trying to give it to the robber. But the
robber would not take it.
"No, I don't want your paper: come with me to your paying teller and

get me the money. Make what explanation you see fit; but
remember--if he hesitates, you die."
They left the private office together, the younger man a short half-step
in the rear, with his pistol-bearing hand thrust under his coat.
MacFarland, the stenographer, was at his desk in the corner of the
anteroom. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the unwonted thing, the
president's forthfaring with a stranger who had somehow gained access
to the private room during the sacred half-hour, would have made him
look up and wonder. But this was the hundredth time, and Andrew
Galbraith's anxious glance aside was wasted upon MacFarland's back.
Still the president did not despair. In the public lobby there would be
more eyes to see, and perhaps some that would understand. Mr.
Galbraith took a firmer hold upon his self-possession and trusted that
some happy chance might yet intervene to save him.
But chance did not intervene. There was a goodly number of customers
in the public space, but not one of the half-dozen or more who nodded
to the president or passed the time of day with him saw the eye-appeal
which was the only one he dared to make. On the short walk around to
the paying teller's window, the robber kept even step with his victim,
and try as he would, Andrew Galbraith could not summon the courage
to forget the pistol muzzle menacing him in its coat-covered ambush.
At the paying wicket there was only one customer, instead of the group
the president had hoped to find; a sweet-faced young woman in a
modest travelling hat and a gray coat. She was getting a draft cashed,
and when she saw them she would have stood aside. It was the robber
who