Patiently Nichols went back to the beginning. Land, water, transportation, and cli—Helen could endure it no longer. One straight question would end it, would leave her facing certainty. She leaned forward and heard her own voice.
“Mr. MacAdams, you came to look at this land. You’ve looked at it. Do you want it?”
There was one startled, arrested gesture from Nichols. Then they remained motionless. The clock ticked loudly. Slowly MacAdams leaned back in his chair, straightened one leg, put his hand into his trouser pocket. He pulled out a grimy canvas bag.
“Yes. How much is the first payment?”
Deliberately he poured out on the desk a heap of golden coins. His stubby fingers extracted from the sack a wad of banknotes. Nichols was figuring madly. “Twelve hundred and seventy-three dollars and ninety cents,” he announced in a shaking voice. MacAdams counted it out with exactness. He signed the contract. Nichols recounted the money and sealed it in an envelope. They rose.
Helen found herself stumbling against the side of the automobile, and felt Nichols squeezing her arm exultantly while he helped her into it. They had reached Ripley before she was able to think. Then she said that she would not return to Coalinga with MacAdams. They put him on the train.
She told Nichols that she wanted the money and the contract. She was going to take the next train to San Francisco. He objected. She argued through a haze, and her greatest difficulty was keeping her voice clear. But she held tenaciously to her purpose. Later she was on the train with the contract and Nichols’ check drawn to Clark & Hayward. She slept then and she slept in the taxicab on the way to a San Francisco hotel. She felt that she was asleep while she wrote her name on a register She shut a door somehow behind a bellboy, and at last could sleep undisturbed.
At nine o’clock the next morning she sat facing Mr. Clark across a big flat-topped desk. The contract and Nichols’ check lay upon it.
Mr. Clark was a lean, shrewd-looking man about forty-five years old. He gave the impression of having kept his nerves at high tension for so many years that now he must strain them still tighter or relax altogether. This catastrophe he would have described as “losing his grip,” and Helen felt that he lived in dread of it as the ultimate calamity. They had been talking for some time. Mr. Clark did not know where Bert was.
“My dear young lady, if we had known—” he said, and he stopped because it would be useless cruelty to complete the sentence. She thought that he would not be cruel unless there were some purpose to be achieved by it. There was even a kindly expression in his eyes at times.
He had explained clearly the situation in which her husband stood. Bert had persuaded the firm to give him an unlimited letter of credit. “That young man has a truly remarkable personality as a salesman. He had us completely up in the air.” He had proposed a gigantic selling campaign in the oil fields, and had so filled Clark & Hayward with his own enthusiasm that they had given him free rein.
The campaign had begun with every promise of astounding success. He had brought huge crowds to hear speakers sent down from the city; had gathered the names of thousands of “leads”; had imported fifty salesmen to canvass these names and bring in prospective buyers. Scores of these had been taken to the land and hundreds more were promised. Clark & Hayward contemplated hiring special trains for them.
But expenses were running into disquieting amounts for the actual results produced. Bert’s checks poured in, and there began to be annoying rumors. The firm had begun a quiet investigation and had decided that he was spending too much of their money for personal expenses. Mr. Clark need not go into details. They had withdrawn the letter of credit and advised creditors in Bakersfield that the firm would no longer pay Mr. Kennedy’s bills.
Mr. Kennedy had been informed of this. He had taken one of the firm’s automobiles and disappeared. Later his check had come in. Clark & Hayward could not make that good, in addition to their other losses. The matter was now entirely out of their hands. Mr. Clark’s gesture placed it in the hands of inscrutable fate. He was more interested in the MacAdams sale and the unexpected appearance of Helen.
However, under her insistence he admitted that if the check were made good, Clark & Hayward could persuade the bank not to press the charge. Of course the warrant was out, but there were ways. He undertook to employ them for her, thoughtfully fingering Nichols’ check. As to finding Bert—well, if the police had failed—
Helen asked how much Bert owed the firm. Mr. Clark told her that the sum was roughly five thousand dollars.
“In thirty days! Why—but—how is it possible?”
The amount included the cost of the automobile. The balance was Mr. Kennedy’s personal expenses, not included in his arrangement with the firm. “Wine—ah—” Mr. Clark did not complete the triology. “Mr. Kennedy’s—recreations were expensive?” He would have the account itemized?
“Oh, no. It isn’t necessary,” said Helen. She would like to know only the exact sum. Mr. Clark pressed a button and asked the girl who answered it to look up the amount. “And, by the way, have this sale entered on the books, and a check made out to—?”
“H. D. Kennedy,” said Helen.
“To H. D. Kennedy for the commissions. Seven and a half percent.”
“You were paying the other salesmen fifteen percent,” said Helen.
That was by special arrangement. The ordinary salesmen in the field were paid seven and a half percent. Helen
