were all serious, and whose hobby was method, Mr. Galbraith had established a custom of giving himself a quiet half-hour of inviolable seclusion in which to read and consider his mail. During this sacred interval the stenographer, standing guard in the outer office, had instructions to deny his chief to callers of any and every degree. Wherefore, when, at twenty minutes to eleven, the door of the private office opened to admit a stranger, the president was justly annoyed.
"Well, sir; what now?" he demanded, impatiently, taking the intruder's measure in a swift glance shot from beneath his bushy white eyebrows.
The unannounced visitor was a young man of rather prepossessing appearance, a trifle tall for his breadth of shoulder, fair, with blue eyes and a curling reddish beard and mustache, the former trimmed to a point. So much the president was able to note in the appraisive glance—and to remember afterward.
The caller made no reply to the curt question. He had turned and was closing the door. There was a quiet insistence in the act that was like the flick of a whip to Mr. Galbraith's irritation.
"If you have business with me, you'll have to excuse me for a few minutes," he protested, still more impatiently. "Be good enough to take a seat in the anteroom until I ring. MacFarland should have told you."
The young man drew up a chair and sat down, ignoring the request as if he had failed to hear it. Ordinarily Mr. Andrew Galbraith's temper was equable enough; the age-cooled temper of a methodical gentleman whose long upper lip was in itself an advertisement of self-control. But such a deliberate infraction of his rules, coupled with the stony impudence of the visitor, made him spring up angrily to ring for the watchman.
The intruder was too quick for him. When his hand sought the bell-push he found himself looking into the muzzle of a revolver, and so was fain to fall back into his chair, gasping.
"Ah-h-h!" he stammered. And when the words could be managed: "So that's it, is it?—you're a robber!"
"No," said the invader of the presidential privacies calmly, speaking for the first time since his incoming. "I am not a robber, save in your own very limited definition of the word. I am merely a poor man, Mr. Galbraith—one of the uncounted thousands—and I want money. If you call for help, I shall shoot you."
"You—you'd murder me?" The president's large-jointed hands were clutching the arms of the pivot-chair, and he was fighting manfully for courage and presence of mind to cope with the terrifying emergency.
"Not willingly, I assure you: I have as great a regard for human life as you have—but no more. You would kill me this moment in self-defence, if you could: I shall most certainly kill you if you attempt to give an alarm. On the other hand, if you prove reasonable and obedient your life is not in danger. It is merely a question of money, and if you are amenable to reason——"
"If I'm—but I'm not amenable to your reasons!" blustered the president, recovering a little from the first shock of terrified astoundment. "I refuse to listen to them. I'll not have anything to do with you. Go away!"
The young man's smile showed his teeth, but it also proved that he was not wholly devoid of the sense of humor.
"Keep your temper, Mr. Galbraith," he advised coolly. "The moment is mine, and I say you shall listen first and obey afterward. Otherwise you die. Which is it to be? Choose quickly—time is precious."
The president yielded the first point, that of the receptive ear; but grudgingly and as one under strict compulsion.
"Well, well, then; out with it. What have you to say for yourself?"
"This: You are rich: you represent the existing order of things. I am poor, and I stand for my necessity, which is higher than any man-made law or custom. You have more money than you can possibly use in any legitimate personal channels: I have not the price of the next meal, already twenty-four hours overdue. I came here this morning with my life in my hand to invite you to share with me a portion of that which is yours chiefly by the right of possession. If you do it, well and good: if not, there will be a new president of the Bayou State Security. Do I make myself sufficiently explicit?"
Andrew Galbraith glanced furtively at the paper-weight clock on his desk. It was nearly eleven, and MacFarland would surely come in on the stroke of the hour. If he could only fend off the catastrophe for a few minutes, until help should come. He searched in his pockets and drew forth a handful of coins.
"You say you are hungry: I'm na that well off that I 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