Thompson did a rough bit of mental figuring.

“I should say it was a cinch,” he said dryly.  “Nobody can accuse you of profiteering.  Yet your undertaking is both patriotic and profitable.  I suppose you had no trouble financing a thing like that?”

“I should say not.  The banks,” Tommy replied with cynical emphasis, “would fall over themselves to get their finger in our pie.  But they won’t.  Hedley and I have some money.  Sam Carr is letting us have fifty thousand dollars at seven per cent.  No bank is going to charge like the Old Guard at Waterloo on overdrafts and advances—­and dictate to us besides.  I’m too wise for that.  I’m not in the game for my health.  I see a big lump of money, and I’m after it.”

“I suppose we all are,” Thompson reflected absently.

“Certainly,” Tommy responded promptly.  “And we’d be suckers if we weren’t.”

He took a puff or two at his cigar and rose.

“Run over to the plant on the North Shore with me to-morrow if you have the time.  We’ll give it the once over, and take a look at the Wallace yard too.  They’re starting on steel tramps there now.  I’m going over about two o’clock.  Will you?”

“Sure.  I’ll take time,” Thompson agreed.

“Come down to MacFee’s wharf and go over with me on the Alert,” Tommy went on.  “That’s the quickest and easiest way to cross the Inlet.  Two o’clock.  Well, I’m off to bed.  Good night, old man.”

“Good night.”

The hall door clicked behind Ashe.  Thompson sat deep in thought for a long time.  Then he fished a note pad out of a drawer and began pencilling figures.

Ten times three hundred thousand was three million.  Ten per cent. on three million was three hundred thousand dollars.  And no chance to lose.  The ten per cent. on construction cost was guaranteed by the Imperial Munitions Board, behind which stood the British Empire.

Didn’t Tommy say the ten schooners were to be completed in eight months?  Then in eight months Tommy Ashe was going to be approximately one hundred and fifty thousand dollars richer.

Thompson wondered if that was why Sam Carr looked at Tommy with that ambiguous expression when Tommy was chanting his work or fight philosophy.  Carr knew the ins and outs of the deal if he were loaning money on it.

And Thompson did not like to think he had read Carr’s look aright, because he was uncomfortably aware that he, Wes Thompson, was following pretty much in Ashe’s footsteps, only on a smaller scale.

He tore the figured sheet into little strips, and went to bed.

CHAPTER XXIV

—­AND THE MATCH THAT LIT THE FUSE—­

At a minute or two of ten the next morning Thompson stopped his car before the Canadian Bank of Commerce.  The bolt-studded doors were still closed, and so he kept his seat behind the steering column, glancing idly along Hastings at the traffic that flowed about the gray stone pile of the post-office, while he waited the bank’s opening for business.