had not branched out into stock brokerage. For that
reason an air of leisure pervaded his office, and men liked to gather
there and discuss the prospects of Lame Gulch. Lame Gulch, as everybody
knows, is the new Colorado mining-camp, which is destined eventually to
make gold a drug in the market. The camp is just on the other side of
the Peak, easily accessible to any Springtown man who is not afraid of
roughing it. And to do them justice, there proved to be scarcely an
invalid or a college-graduate among them all who did not make his way up
there, and take his first taste of hardship like a man.

Hillerton used to sit behind the balustrade which divided his sanctum
from the main office, and listen with an astute expression, and just the
glimmer of a smile, to the talk of the incipient millionaires, who
bragged with such ease and fluency of this or that Bonanza. When all
declared with one accord that "if Lame Gulch panned out as it was dead
sure to do, Springtown would be the biggest _little_ town in all
creation," Hillerton's smile became slightly accentuated, but a wintry
chill of incredulity had a neutralizing effect upon it. As the
excitement increased, and his fellow-townsmen manifested a willingness
to mortgage every inch of wood and plaster in their possession,
Hillerton merely became, if possible, more stringent in the matter of
securities.

"We might as well take a mortgage on the town, and done with it," he
remarked to his confidential clerk one Saturday evening. "We shall own
it all in six months, anyhow!"

Peckham, the confidential clerk, shrugged his shoulders, and said he
"guessed it was about so."

Hillerton's confidential clerk usually assented to the dictum of his
principal. It saved trouble and hurt nobody. Not that Lewis Peckham was
without opinions of his own; but he took no special interest in them,
and rarely put himself to the trouble of defending them.

The young man's countenance had never been an expressive one, and during
the three years he had spent in Hillerton's employ, his face had lost
what little mobility it had ever possessed. He was a pale,
hollow-chested individual, with a bulging forehead, curiously marked
eyebrows, and a prominent and sensitive nose. A gentleman, too, as
anybody could see, but a gentleman of a singularly unsocial disposition.
He looked ten years older than he was--an advantage which Hillerton
recognized. His grave, unencouraging manner had a restraining effect