“Hotel Midas,” Johnny crisply directed, and jumped into the tonneau, whereupon the chauffeur touched one finger to her bonnet, and the machine leaped forward.

“You’re lazy,” chided Constance.  “We’ve been waiting twenty minutes.  We were afraid you might be gone, but they told us that you had not yet come down.”

“If I’d known you were coming I’d have been at the curb before daybreak,” grinned Johnny.  “You’re in some rush this morning.”

“There must be some rushing if you have that million dollars by four o’clock,” laughed Constance.  “Polly and I want you to have it.”

“You’re right that I’ll have to go some,” he admitted.

“Excuse the chauffeur for interrupting your conversation,” protested Polly, turning round and deftly missing a venturesome banana cart; “but you grabbed off half a million of it on a holiday.”

“It was twelve-thirty this morning when we took Gresham,” claimed Johnny.  “This is a working-day.”

“Hotel Midas,” announced the chauffeur, pulling up to that flamboyant new hostelry with a flourish.

Johnny hurried in to the desk, where Mr. Boise had already left word that Mr. Gamble should be shown right up.  He found that fatigue-proof old Westerner shining from his morning ablutions, as neat as a pin from head to foot, and smoking his after-breakfast cigar in a parlor which had not so much as a tidy displaced.  His eyes twinkled the moment he saw Johnny.

“I suppose you still have a disinterested anxiety to have me adopt the Sage City and Salt Pool route?” he laughed.

“I’m still anxious about it,” amended Johnny, refusing to smile at his own evasion of the disinterestedness.  “I brought you a wad of reports and things to show you how good that territory is.  You don’t know what a rich pay-streak you’d open up in that part of the Sancho Hills Basin.”

Mr. Boise laughed with keen enjoyment.

“I don’t think I need to wade through that stuff, Johnny,” he admitted, having picked up from Courtney the habit of calling young Gamble by his first name.  “To tell you the truth, I sent a wireless telegram to my chief engineer yesterday afternoon, off Courtney’s yacht when we connected with the Taft, and this morning I have a five-hundred-word night lettergram from him, telling me that after a thorough investigation of the situation he finds that the Sage City and the Lariat Center routes are so evenly balanced in advantage that a choice of them is really only a matter of sentiment.”

Johnny paused awkwardly, stumped for the first time in his life.

“I don’t know how to make that kind of an argument,” he confessed, to the great enjoyment of Boise.

“It is rather difficult,” admitted that solidly constructed railroad president; “particularly since I personally favor the Lariat Center route.”

Johnny again felt very awkward.

“Can’t we put this on some sort of a business basis?” he implored.