er he became suddenly and unexpectedly active. He left
the house as soon as his breakfast was eaten, and he did not come home
to luncheon--a circumstance which irritated Hazel, since it was one of
those rare days when she herself lunched at home. Late in the
afternoon he telephoned briefly that he would dine downtown. And when
he did return, at nine or thereabouts in the evening, he clamped a
cigar between his teeth, and fell to work covering a sheet of paper
with interminable rows of figures.

Hazel had worried over the possibility of his having had another tilt
with the Scotch and sodas. He relieved her of that fear, and she
restrained her curiosity until boredom seized her. The silence and the
scratching of his pen began to grate on her nerves.

"What is all the clerical work about?" she inquired. "Reckoning your
assets and liabilities?"

Bill smiled and pushed aside the paper.

"I'm going to promote a mining company," he told her, quite casually.
"It has been put up to me as a business proposition--and I've got to
the stage where I have to do _something_, or I'll sure have the
Willies."

She overlooked the latter statement; it conveyed no special
significance at the time. But his first statement opened up
possibilities such as of late she had sincerely hoped would come to
pass, and she was all interest.

"Promote a mining company?" she repeated. "That sounds extremely
businesslike. How--when--where?"

"Now--here in Granville," he replied. "The how is largely Paul
Lorimer's idea. You see," he continued, warming up a bit to the
subject, "when I was prospecting that creek where we made the clean-up
last summer, I ran across a well-defined quartz lead. I packed out a
few samples in my pockets, and I happened to show them as well as one
or two of the nuggets to some of these fellows at the club a while
back. Lorimer took a piece of the quartz and had it assayed. It looms
up as something pretty big. So he and Brooks and a couple of other
fellows want me to go ahead and organize and locate a group of claims
in there. Twenty or thirty thousand dollars capital might make 'em all
rich. Of course, the placer end of it will be the big thing while the
lode is being developed. It should pay well from the start. Getting
the start is easy. As a matter of fact, you could sell any old wildcat
that has the magic of gold about it. Men seem to get the fever as soon
as they finger the real yellow stuff. The