There remained old Metzeger who worked silently all day over a set of giant ledgers, interminably beautifying their pages with his meticulous figures.  True, Bean had once heard Bulger fail interestingly to borrow five dollars of Metzeger until Saturday noon, but a flash of true Napoleonic genius now enabled him to see precisely why Bulger had not succeeded.  Metzeger lived for numerals, for columned digits alone.  He carried thousands of them in his head and apparently little else.  He could tell to the fraction of a cent what Union Pacific had opened at on any day you chose to name.  He had a passion for odd amounts.  A flat million as a sum interested him far less than one like $107.69-3/4.  He could remember it longer.  It was necessary then to appeal to the poetry in the man.

A long time from across his typewriter he studied old Metzeger, tall, angular, his shoulders lovingly rounded above one of the ledgers, a green shade pulled well over his eyes, perhaps to conceal the too-flagrant love-light that shone there for his figures.  Napoleon had won most of his battles in his tent.

Bean arose, moved toward the other and spoke in clear, cool tones.

“Mr. Metzeger, I want to borrow five dollars—­”

The old man perceptibly stiffened and bent his head lower.

“—­five dollars and eighty-seven cents until Saturday at ten minutes past twelve.”

Metzeger looked up, surveying him keenly from under the green shade.

“How much?’

“Five eighty-seven.”

There was a curious relenting in the sharpened old face.  The man had been struck in a vital spot.  With his fine-pointed pen he affectionately wrote the figures on a pad:  “$5.87—­12:10.”  They were ideal; they vanquished him.  Slowly he counted out money from various pockets, but the sum was $5.90.

“Bring me the change,” he said.

Bean brought it from the clerk who kept the stamp-box.  Metzeger replaced three pennies in a pocket, and Bean moved off with the sum he had demanded, feeling almost as once he might have felt after Marengo.

It must be true!  He couldn’t have done the thing yesterday.

He omitted his visit to the dog that day and loitered for an hour in a second-hand bookshop he had often passed.  He remembered it because of a coloured print that hung in the window, “The Retreat from Moscow.”  He had glanced carelessly enough at this, hardly noting who it was that headed the gloomy procession.  Now he felt the biting cold, and shivered, though the day was warm.  There were pleasanter prints inside.  In one, Napoleon with sternly folded arms gazed down at a sleeping sentry.  In another he reviewed troops at Fontainebleau, and again, from an eminence, he overlooked a spirited battle, directing it with a masterly wave of his sabre.  These things were a little disconcerting to one in whom the blood-lust had diminished.  He was better pleased with a steel engraving of the coronation, and this he secured for a trifle.  It was a thing to nourish an ailing ego, a scene to draw sustenance from when people overwhelmed you in street cars and took your gold watch.