Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/171

 loading had been hindered and bungled consistently. A dozen mishaps and a dozen odd financial backsets had followed each other, and it looked as if disaster had come to the Gregory Steamship Company, and come to stay.

Too anxious for the house they had served long and staunchly to rest, and anxious for their own salt too, the two men had returned after office hours to talk it over—to find a way out, if they could.

And the deeper they went into their canvass of affairs, the more difficult and bad it all seemed. And certainly the strange disappearance of young Gregory was far and away the worst feature of the entire complication. The Gregory purse was long, the Gregory credit enormous; both would stand a great deal of strain. But the accident (or whatever it was) to his boy was beginning to tell upon the father—that had been evident all day; and when Robert Gregory's nerve went, the greatest asset of the firm went.

And for this reason, rather than for any keen feeling for the young man who had shown but little for the business at which they toiled loyally early, and late, while he neglected it or played at it flippantly, and from which, as a rule, he drew in a day rather more in the way of cash than they together did in a week, it was of his disappearance and of the chance of his return that they spoke and planned, much more than of the ledger that lay between them, or the more immediate affairs of the office.

And while the six—two here, four in the hotel on the Peak—were trying to think and to contrive, two others, but quite separately, were doing something more active.

John Bradley, just at midnight, came out of a tiny house in Po Yan Street, not far from the Tung Wah