ankly--he'll create a lot of unpleasantness.
Might disrupt the company, in fact, if he sticks to the position he
took this morning. Thought I'd run in and talk it over with him.
Fellow's generally in a good humor, you know, when he's lunched
comfortably at home."

"I'm quite in the dark," Hazel confessed. "Bill seemed a trifle put
out about something. He didn't say what it was about."

"Shall I explain?" Mr. Brooks suggested. "You'd understand--and you
might be able to help. I don't as a rule believe in bringing business
into the home, but this bothers me. I hate to see a good thing go
wrong."

"Explain, by all means," Hazel promptly replied. "If I can help, I'll
be glad to."

"Thank you." Mr. Brooks polished his glasses industriously for a
second and replaced them with painstaking exactitude. "Now--ah--this
is the situation: When the company was formed, five of us, including
your husband, took up enough stock to finance the preliminary work of
the undertaking. The remaining stock, seventy-five thousand dollars in
amount, was left in the treasury, to be held or put on the market as
the situation warranted. Bill was quite conservative in his first
statements concerning the property, and we all felt inclined to go
slow. But when Bill got out there on the ground and the thing began to
pay enormously right from the beginning, we--that is, the four of us
here, decided we ought to enlarge our scope. With the first clean-up,
Bill forwarded facts and figures to show that we had a property far
beyond our greatest expectations. And, of course, we saw at once that
the thing was ridiculously undercapitalized. By putting the balance of
the stock on the market, we could secure funds to work on a much larger
scale. Why, this first shipment of gold is equal to an annual dividend
of ten per cent on four hundred thousand dollars capital. It's
immense, for six weeks' work.

"So we held a meeting and authorized the secretary to sell stock.
Naturally, your husband wasn't cognizant of this move, for the simple
reason that there was no way of reaching him--and his interests were
thoroughly protected, anyway. The stock was listed on Change. A good
bit was disposed of privately. We now have a large fund in the
treasury. It's a cinch. We've got the property, and it's rich enough
to pay dividends on a million. The decision of the stockholders is
unanimously for enlargement of the capital stock. The quicker we get
th