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Jake spoke quietly but urgently, and his usually mild eyes were a match for his manner. He was Booker’s confidential clerk, a man of quiet efficiency and whose vision was unusually clear. So, for all his swift wrath, Booker had let him talk. Now, however, the usurer leapt uppermost and his reply was swift and biting.

“You want me to hand out eight thousand at the orders of this gang?” he cried, furiously. “You want me to pass eight thousand good dollars to Rebecca Carver when she’s ready to close for two? You’re crazy, Jake! Crazy as a bed-bug! If that’s the sort of business we’re to do, I guess the sooner we close our doors and beat it the better. Besides——”

“And the hanging bee?”

The eyes of the clerk were steadily regarding his furious chief, and somehow the quiet reminder was not without effect. Booker shifted his gaze and it fell on the lamentable design of the skull.

“This thing sets me crazy mad,” he protested, and his tone had somehow fallen from its original bluster.

“But you’ll be madder—for a while—at the hanging bee.”