!" responded Payne.

"I'll give you a deal that will help you get rich a lot quicker than if
I stayed with you."

Tibbetts shook his head and was silent a long time. "Well, if you're
bound to sell, you won't go out of here exactly busted--after two years
with me," he said at last. "Rog! Do you mean it? We're going to
part?"

"It would be plain hell for me to stick, Jim."

Tibbetts grasped the extended hard brown hand in his own soft white
fingers. After a while he managed to stammer:

"I see. This just had to come!"

II

On the fat rolling lands about Jordan City pedigreed kine graze by the
hundreds, corn grows high and thick and silos are to be seen in every
barnyard. And in Jordan City bank accounts are large and permanent.

It is an old town, as age goes in the Mississippi Valley. Maple trees
with huge, solid trunks and immense branches line its older streets.
The streets themselves, save for the strip of asphalt where the state
highway sweeps through the town, are largely paved with hard red
bricks. In the older streets in the residence sections the sidewalks
are of the same material, and in many places soft green moss grows
undisturbed upon these hard red paths. Back from the little-used
sidewalks of these sections, surrounded by hedges of Osage orange or
box elder, stand old staid houses in good paint and repair. Rich
retired owners of the fat acres of Jordan County live in most of them
and own ponderous eight-cylinder cars.

There is a new section of the town, too, where the architecture runs to
bungalow styles, where the installment collectors from the phonograph
houses are regularly seen, and where papa gets out in front and twirls
the crank when the family car goes out for its airing. No important
line of demarcation separates the old staid section of town from the
new and brighter one. Major Trimble, President of the Jordan Bank &
Trust Company, accepts deposits from both sections with strict
impartiality; the spire of the Methodist Episcopal Church is the Sunday
lodestone to folk on both sides of town, as well as for much of the
country round. They talk mainly of farms, of cattle and of the weather
on the streets of Jordan; and the young folk largely go off to Chicago
to make their way in the world.

Into this farm-ringed islet of tranquillity, where faith in one's
fellowman, and hoarded money, are in abundance, about the time that
Roger Payne was beginning to know that his p