Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/268

238 smiled to himself grimly, "by buying up lots about the city when they were cheap and everybody scared and selling them for a song, and we had only to hold them until they made us rich. I am now a rich old bachelor, Trant, hunting in season and trap-shooting out, and setting up Jim Tyler in the gun business between times. The worst that was said about Neal was his drinking and bad temper; for Leigh, his daughter, goes as well as anybody else in her circle; and even young Jim Tyler has the run of a dozen clubs. That's all good, respectable and satisfactory, isn't it? And is that all you know?"

"That's all," replied Trant curtly.

"Never heard of Sheppard's White Palace, did you? Don't know that when you speak to one of those old boys of thirty years ago—the coterie, you called them—about Mr. Stephen Sheppard, the thought that comes into his head is, 'Oh! you mean Steve Sheppard, the gambler!' Thirty years ago, more or less, we were making our money to buy those lots in a liquor palace and gambling hell—Neal and I and Jim Tyler's father—old Jim."

"There were more than just Neal and old Tyler and me, though," he burst on, pacing the length of the rug beside Trant's desk and not looking at his consultant at all. "There were the Findlays besides—Enoch, who was up in the woods with us, he gets his picture in the paper every six months or so for paying a thousand dollars for a thousand-year-old cent piece; and Enoch's brother, and Chapin, whom we're going to meet in a few minutes. We ran a square game—as square as any; understand that! But we