Page:More lives than one.djvu/137



Finally, he picked up the telephone and called Nick Nelson, who got around to him in the shortest possible time.

“Well,” Barham said, after they had discussed matters of lesser moment, “now, out with it, Nick, all about Maddy. Tell me the worst. As you know, very frequently other people know more about a man’s wife than he knows himself.”

“I’ll tell you, Drew,” Nelson said, gravely, “because you ought to know. To begin with, Maddy played Bridge for far higher stakes than you ever dreamed she did. She would lose hundreds, sometimes thousands, in an evening.”

“Maddy! Thousands!”

“Perhaps not often thousands, but almost always hundreds. She was what they call born to bad luck—always held miserable hands”

“Oh, come now, Nick, hands even up in the long run.”

“Not always. Not with some people. But, anyway, Maddy was an erratic player, and a wild one. If she won a pile, she’d raise the stakes and lose it all on a final hand, or something like that. She had all the impulses of a born gambler—she must have had a gambling ancestor—and yet, she always paid.”

“How could she?”

“That’s just it. She borrowed at first, Drew, from all her friends. Her funny code of ethics let her owe a loan, but not a card debt.”

“She wasn’t unique in that respect.”

“No; well, when she could borrow no more, when she had exhausted her mother’s generosity—and purse, probably—she resorted to—I can’t say it, but she knew secrets about her woman friends that she threatened to tell unless they paid her.”

“Blackmail!” and Andrew Barham gasped in horror.