“I’ll talk any place you say,” consented Johnny.  “Where do you lunch?”

“At August Schoppenvoll’s,” replied Mr. Ersten with no hint of an intention to disclose where August Schoppenvoll’s place might be.  “At lunch-time I talk no business; I eat.”

The speculator studied those forbidding bushy brows in silence for a moment.  Beneath them, between heavy lids, glowed a pair of very stern gray eyes; but at the outward corner of each eye were two deep, diverging creases, which belied some of the sternness.

“Where do you sleep?” Johnny asked.

“I don’t talk business in my sleep,” asserted Mr. Ersten stoutly, and then he laughed with considerable heartiness, pleased immensely with his own joke and not noticing that it was more than half Johnny’s.  After all, Johnny had only implied it; he had said it!  Accordingly he relented a trifle.  “From four to half-past five, at Schoppenvoll’s, I play skat,” he added.

“Thank you,” said Johnny briskly, and started for the nearest telephone directory.  “I’ll drop in on you.”

“Well,” returned Ersten resignedly, “it won’t do you any good.”

Johnny grinned and went out, having first made a swift but careful estimate of Ersten’s room, accommodations and requirements.  Outside, he studied the surrounding property, then called on a real estate firm.

At four-ten he went into the dim little basement wine-room of Schoppenvoll.  He had timed this to a nicety, hoping to arrive just after the greetings were over and before the game had begun, and he accomplished that purpose; for, with the well-thumbed cards lying between them and three half-emptied steins of beer on the table, Ersten was opposite a pink-faced man with curly gray hair, whose clothes sat upon his slightly portly person with fashion-plate precision.  It was this very same suit about which Ersten was talking when Johnny entered.

“Na, Kurzerhosen,” he said with a trace of pathos in his guttural voice, “when you die we have no more suits of clothes like that.”

“I thank you,” returned the flexible soft voice of Kurzerhosen.  “It is like the work you make in your ladies’ garments, Ersten.  When you die we shall have no more good walking clothes for our womenfolks.”

“And when Schoppenvoll dies we have no more good wine,” declared Ersten with conviction and a wave of his hand as Schoppenvoll approached them with an inordinately long-necked bottle, balancing it carefully on its side.

Johnny had drawn near the table now, but no one saw him, for this moment was one of deep gravity.  Schoppenvoll, a tall, straight-backed man with the dignity of a major, a waving gray pompadour, and a clean-cut face that might have belonged to a Beethoven, set down the tray at the very edge of the table and slid it gently into place.  An overgrown fat boy, with his sleeves rolled to his shoulders, brought three shining glasses, three bottles of Glanzen Wasser and a corkscrew.