Explore "Five Thousand an Hour" by George Randolph Chester on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Sitting tight and watching the hands of his watch go round, with a deficit of five thousand dollars an hour piling up against him, was as hard work as Johnny Gamble had ever done; and yet he knew that, if he succumbed to impatience and went to the De Luxe Apartments Company before they came to him, he would relinquish a fifty per cent, advantage. He saw another day slipping past him, with a total deficit of sixteen hours behind his schedule -- or an appalling shortage of eighty thousand dollars -- when, at one o'clock on Thursday, the expected happened -- and a brisk little man, with a mustache which would have been highly luxuriant if he had not kept it bitten off as closely as he could reach it, dropped in, inquired for Loring, jerked a chair as close to him as he could get it and said, in one breath: "Want to sell your river-view property?"
"Certainly," replied Loring, in whose name the property stood. "Mr. Gamble is handling that for me. Mr. Chase, Mr. Gamble."