Virgil, I couldn't exactly let you walk off with it like swallering a
pat o' butter, now, could I? It didn't look exactly reasonable to expect
me to let go like that, now, did it?"

Adams found a half-choked voice somewhere in his throat. "Do you--would
you step into my office a minute, Mr. Lamb?"

"Why, certainly I'm willing to have a little talk with you," the old
gentleman said, as he followed his former employee indoors, and he
added, "I feel a lot more like it than I did before I got THAT up, over
yonder, Virgil!"

Adams threw open the door of the rough room he called his office, having
as justification for this title little more than the fact that he had a
telephone there and a deal table that served as a desk. "Just step into
the office, please," he said.

Lamb glanced at the desk, at the kitchen chair before it, at the
telephone, and at the partition walls built of old boards, some covered
with ancient paint and some merely weatherbeaten, the salvage of a
house-wrecker; and he smiled broadly. "So these are your offices, are
they?" he asked. "You expect to do quite a business here, I guess, don't
you, Virgil?"

Adams turned upon him a stricken and tortured face. "Have you seen
Charley Lohr since last night, Mr. Lamb?"

"No; I haven't seen Charley."

"Well, I told him to tell you," Adams began;--"I told him I'd pay
you----"

"Pay me what you expect to make out o' glue, you mean, Virgil?"

"No," Adams said, swallowing. "I mean what my boy owes you. That's what
I told Charley to tell you. I told him to tell you I'd pay you every
last----"

"Well, well!" the old gentleman interrupted, testily. "I don't know
anything about that."

"I'm expecting to pay you," Adams went on, swallowing again, painfully.
"I was expecting to do it out of a loan I thought I could get on my
glue-works."

The old gentleman lifted his frosted eyebrows. "Oh, out o' the
GLUE-works? You expected to raise money on the glue-works, did you?"

At that, Adams's agitation increased prodigiously. "How'd you THINK I
expected to pay you?" he said. "Did you think I expected to get money on
my own old bones?" He slapped himself harshly upon the chest and legs.
"Do you think a bank'll lend money on a man's ribs and his broken-down
old knee-bones? They won't do it! You got to have some BUSINESS
prospects to show 'em, if you haven't got any property nor securities;
and what business prospects have I got now, with that sign of yours up
over