"

* * * * *

Mr. Vancourt Henniker was not greatly surprised when Tom Gordon asked
for a private interview on the morning following the final closing down
of all the industries at Gordonia.

Without being in Gordon's confidence, or in that of American Aqueduct,
the banker had been shrewdly putting two and two together and applying
the result as a healing plaster to the stock he had taken as security
for the final loan to Colonel Duxbury.

"I thought, perhaps, you might wish to buy this stock, Mr. Gordon," he
said, when Tom had stated his business. "Of course, it can be arranged,
with Mr. Farley's consent to our anticipating the maturity of his notes.
But"--with a genial smile and a glance over his eye-glasses--"I'm not
sure that we care to part with it. Perhaps some of us would like to hold
it and bid it in."

Tom's smile matched the genial expansiveness of the president's.

"I reckon you don't want it, Mr. Henniker. You'll understand that it
isn't worth the paper it is printed on when I tell you that I have sold
my pipe-pit patents to American Aqueduct."

"Heavens and earth! Then the plant doesn't carry the patents? You've
kept this mighty quiet, among you!"

"Haven't we!" said Tom fatuously. "I know just how you feel--like a man
who has been looking over the edge of the bottomless pit without knowing
it. You'll let me have the stock for the face of the loan, won't you?"

But the president was already pressing the button of the electric bell
that summoned the cashier. There was no time like the present when the
fate of a considerable bank asset hung on the notion of a smiling young
man whose mind might change in the winking of an eye.

With the Farley stock in his pocket Tom took a room at the Marlboro and
spent the remainder of that day, and all the days of the fortnight
following, wrestling mightily with the lawyers in winding up the tangled
skein of Chiawassee affairs. Propped in his bed at Warwick Lodge, the
bed he had not left since the night of violence, Duxbury Farley signed
everything that was offered to him, and the obstacles to a settlement
were vanquished, one by one.

When it was all over, Tom began to draw checks on the small fortune
realized from the sale of the patents. One was to Major Dabney,
redeeming his two hundred shares of Chiawassee Limited at par. Another
was to the order of Ardea Dabney, covering the Farley shares at a
valuation based on the prospero