ames on a card. To tell you the truth,
we are to some extent interested with them. Now, don't show this sample
to anyone else, but go straight to Clarm & Ging, Rookery building,
Chicago. Anybody can tell you where it is. Here's the card. We'll
telegraph them that you are coming, so you are somewhat in honor bound,
you understand, not to go elsewhere--we have in some degree sealed the
transaction with a part purchase, you see."

I walked out of that house, dazed, bewildered with my own luck. And I
took passage on the first train for Chicago. If money could clear Alf,
he would now be cleared, and proudly I mused over the great difference
that I would make between his first and his last trial. But during all
this time I was conscious of a heaviness--the silence of Guinea.

The train reached Chicago at morning. And now I was in the midst of a
whirl and a roar--a confused babbling at the base of Babel's tower. And
as I walked up a street I thought that a tornado had broken loose and
that I was in the center of it. I called a hackman, for my reading
taught me what to do, and I told him to drive me to the Rookery. He
rattled away and came within one of being upset by other vehicles, and I
yelled at him to be more particular, but on he went, paying no attention
to me. After a while he drew up in front of a building as big as a
lopped-off spur of a mountain range; and when I got out I found that the
vitals of the hurricane had shifted with me, for the roar and the
confusion was worse, was gathering new forces. But no one laughed at me,
no one pointed me out, and I really felt quite pleased with myself--a
school-teacher, a lawyer's assistant, expected by a capitalist! I went
under a marble arch-way, and asked a man if he knew Clarm & Ging, and he
pointed to an elevator--I knew what it was--and shouted a number. I got
in and was shot to the eighth floor. I knocked at a door, but no one
opened it. There was no bell to ring, so I knocked louder and still no
one opened the door. This was hardly the courtesy that I expected. But
while I was standing there a man came along and went in without
knocking. I thought that he must be one of the men I was looking for,
and I followed him, but he simply looked round after going in and then
went out again without saying anything. I saw a man sitting at a desk,
and I handed him the card which the hardware dealer had given me. He
looked at it and said: "Yes, you are Hawes, eh? Where's your mica."