be lost.

But Duncan was still mystified, and in answer to his questions Captain
Hallam explained.

"When you got yourself into trouble by monkeying with the accentuations
of a buzz saw," he said, "I could see only one way out, and that was to
put you into a position where even the disembodied spirit of Calumny
itself could not pretend to believe old Napper Tandy's yarn. You know
Tandy is fond of playing tricks, especially upon me, and as the
president and controlling spirit of a rather strong bank, he has been
able to give me a good deal of trouble now and then. A year ago Stafford
and I decided that it might some day be handy for us to control a
majority of the stock in Tandy's bank. There was a good deal of it lying
about loose--that is to say, a number of people held little blocks of
it, ranging from one share to five. All of these people were more or
less under Tandy's influence, and all of them were in the habit of
giving him proxies to vote their stock or else themselves going into the
stockholders' meeting and voting as he desired. Stafford and I quietly
set about buying up this loose stock--through other people, of course,
so that we shouldn't appear in the matter. We had got forty-eight per
cent. of it, when you got yourself into trouble with Tandy. It occurred
to me that if we could get three or four more shares and emphasize our
confidence in you by making you president of Tandy's own bank, and
turning him out to grass, he might see the point and stop his lies. I
flatter myself that Stafford and I are pretty well known all over the
West and among bankers in the East. We are not at all generally regarded
as a pair of sublimated idiots--which same we should certainly be if we
deliberately made a bank president out of a young man whose integrity
was open to any possibility of suspicion. Now, don't be in a
hurry!"--seeing that Duncan was eager to ask questions, or to express
his appreciation of Captain Hallam's interest in himself--"don't be in a
hurry and don't interrupt. Let me tell you the whole story. At first I
didn't see any possible way in which to secure the three shares, without
which I could do nothing. I took pains to have the stock register of the
bank examined. I found that Tandy himself and the members of his
immediate family owned forty-eight shares, and that four more belonged
to Kennedy, the tug captain whom you discharged after calling him by a
picturesque variety of pet names. Of course it wa