es afterward. It hurt and I howled, but he only looked at me
coldly until at last I asked him to help. He let the thing squeeze
while he asked if a rat-trap hurt. I admitted that it did. Would I
believe him next time? I acknowledged that I would, and he opened the
trap. That was all there was to it except the raw place on my hand;
but that night he came to my room after I had gone to bed, and lay
beside me and cuddled me in his arms until I went to sleep."

"Bobby," said Agnes seriously, "not one of these letters but proves
his aching love for you."

"I know it," admitted Bobby with again that grim smile. "Which only
goes to prove another thing, that I'm in for some of the severest
drubbings of my life. I wonder where the clubs are hidden."

He found one of them late that same night at the Idlers'. Clarence
Smythe, Silas Trimmer's son-in-law, drifted in toward the wee small
hours in an unusual condition of hilarity. He had a Vandyke, had Mr.
Smythe, and was one who cherished a mad passion for clothes; also, as
an utterly impossible "climber," he was as cordially hated as Bobby
was liked at the Idlers', where he had crept in "while the window was
open," as Nick Allstyne expressed it. Ordinarily he was most prim and
pretty of manner, but to-night he was on vinously familiar terms with
all the world, and, crowding himself upon Bobby's quiet whist crowd,
slapped Bobby joyously on the shoulder.

"Generous lad, Bobby!" he thickly informed Allstyne and Winthrop and
Starlett. "If you chaps have any property you've wanted to unload for
half a lifetime, here's the free-handed plunger to buy it."

"How's that?" Bobby wanted to know, guessing instantly at the
humiliating truth.

"That Westmarsh swamp belonged to Trimmer," laughed Mr. Smythe, so
bubbling with the hugeness of the joke that he could not keep his
secret; "and when Thorne, after pumping your puffy man, told my clever
father-in-law you wanted it, he promptly bought it from himself in the
name of Miles, Eddy and Company and put up the price to three hundred
an acre. Besides taking the property off his shoulders you've given
him nearly a ten-thousand-dollar advance for it. Fine business!"

"Great!" agreed blunt Jack Starlett. "Almost as good a joke as
refusing to pay a poker debt because it isn't legal."

Bobby smiled his thanks for the shot, but inside he was sick. The game
they were playing was a parting set-to, for the three others were
leaving in the morning f