old the truth. "You will soon be
repaid. Mr. Williams is demanding money from my father and Uncle Jim,
and I dislike, for many reasons well known to you, to be under
obligations to him. If you can, without inconvenience to yourself, lend
this money, it will help father greatly just at this time, and will
perhaps save me from a certain frightful importunity. The money will be
repaid to you after harvest, when collections become easier. If I did
not honestly believe so, even my mother's commands would not induce me
to write this letter."

Rita fully believed the money would be paid; but Billy knew that if he
made the loan, he would be throwing his money away forever.

After making good Dic's loss of twenty-six hundred dollars,--which sum,
you may remember, went to Bays,--Little had remaining in his strong-box
notes to the amount of two thousand dollars, which, together with his
small stock of goods and two or three hundred dollars in cash,
constituted the total sum of his worldly wealth. He had reached a point
in life where he plainly saw old age staring him in the face--an ugly
stare which few can return with equanimity. The small bundle of notes
was all that stood between him and want when that time should come "sans
everything." But Williams was staring Rita in the face, and if the
little hoard could save her, she was welcome to it.

Billy's sleep the night after he received Rita's letter was meagre and
disturbed, but next morning he took his notes and his poor little
remainder of cash and went to Indianapolis. He discounted the notes, as
he had done in Dic's case, and with the proceeds he went to the store of
Fisher and Bays. Fisher was present when Billy entered the private
office and announced his readiness to supply the firm with twenty-three
hundred dollars on their note of hand. The money, of course, being
borrowed by the firm, went to the firm account, and was at once applied
by Fisher upon one of the many Williams notes. Therefore Tom's
"overdrafts" remained _in statu quo_; likewise the penitentiary.

The payment of Billy Little's twenty-three hundred dollars upon the
Williams debt did not help matters in the least. The notes owed by the
firm of Fisher and Bays to the Williams house aggregated nearly fourteen
thousand dollars, and Billy's poor little all did not stem the tide of
importunity one day, although it left him penniless. The thought of his
poverty was of course painful to Billy, but he rode home th