And what could be easier than to pay one of them,
and to have your enemy listed with the suspects?"
The Major smiled in amusement. It always gave him delight to witness
Montague's consternation over his pictures of the city's corruption.
"There are things even stranger than that," he said. "I can
introduce you to a man who's in this room now, who was fighting the
Ship-building swindle, and he got hold of a lot of important
papers, and he took them to his office, and sat by while his clerks
made thirty-two copies of them. And he put the originals and
thirty-one of the copies in thirty-two different safe-deposit vaults
in the city, and took the other copy to his home in a valise. And
that night burglars broke in, and the valise was missing. The next
day he wrote to the people he was fighting, 'I was going to send you
a copy of the papers which have come into my possession, but as you
already have a copy, I will simply proceed to outline my
proposition.' And that was all. They settled for a million or two."
The Major paused a moment and looked across the dining-room.
Pages:
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65