neth, and did what I would
have died rather than do for myself--I begged like a dog. But I might as
well have gone outside and butted my head against the brick wall of the
bank."

Griswold forgot his own real, though possibly indirect, obligation to
Jasper Grierson.

"That is where you made a mistake: you should have told him to go to
hell with his money!" was his acrid comment. And then: "How near can you
come to lifting this note to-morrow, Raymer?"

"'Near' isn't the word. Possibly I might sweep the corners and gather up
twelve or fifteen thousand dollars."

"That will do," said the querist, shortly. "Make it ten thousand, and
I'll contribute the remaining ninety."

Raymer sprang out of his chair as if its padded arms had been suddenly
turned into high-voltage electrodes.

"You will?--you'll do that for me, Griswold?" he said, with a queer
stridency in his voice that made the word-craftsman, always on the watch
for apt similes, think of a choked chicken. But Raymer was swallowing
hard and trying to go on. "By Jove--it's the most generous thing I ever
heard of!--but I can't let you do it. I haven't a thing in the world to
offer you but the stock, and that may not be worth the paper it is
printed on if Jasper Grierson has made up his mind to break me."

"Sit down again and let us thresh it out," said Griswold. "How much of a
Socialist are you, Raymer?"

The young ironmaster sat down, gasping a little at the sudden wrenching
aside of the subject.

"Why, I don't know; enough to want every man to have a square deal, I
guess."

"Including the men in your shops?"

"Putting them first," was the prompt correction. "It was my father's
policy, and it has been mine. We have never had any labor troubles."

"You pay fair wages?"

"We do better than that. A year ago, I introduced a modified plan of
profit-sharing."

Griswold's eyes were lighting up with the altruistic fires.

"Once in awhile, Raymer, a thing happens so fortuitously as to fairly
compel a belief in the higher powers that our fathers included in the
word 'Providence'," he said, almost solemnly. "You have described
exactly an industrial situation which seems to me to offer a solution of
the whole vexed question of master and man, and to be a seed-sowing
which is bound to be followed by an abundant and most humanizing
harvest. Ever since I began to study, even in a haphazard way, the
social system under which we sweat and groan, I've wanted in on a j