now, fumbling in his pockets for some papers and a fountain
pen--"I've drawn up a letter to your two partners,--let me see; where
is it? Oh, yes, here you are--a letter from you advising them to close
with that Lawrenceburg offer. If you'll just authorize me to send a
wire in your name, and then read this letter that I've blocked out and
sign it----"

I glanced hastily over the type-written sheet he handed me. It was a
business-like letter addressed to Barrett and Gifford, going fully into
the situation from the point of view of a man needing ready money, and
urging the acceptance of the Lawrenceburg offer, not wholly for the
personal reason upon which Whitredge had been enlarging, but
emphatically as a prudent business measure--an alternative to the
possible loss of everything.

"You see just how the matter stands," he went on while I was reading
the letter. "They've got you stopped, and that is pretty good evidence
that the court is holding you as trespassers on Lawrenceburg property.
The next thing in order, if you fellows hold out, will be a suit for
damages which will gobble up all your former returns from the mine and
leave you without anything--you and both of your partners."

"What do you get out of it if this sale goes through, Whitredge?" I
asked him suddenly.

He laughed as if I had perpetrated a new joke.

"What do _I_ get out of it? Why, bless your innocent soul, Bert, ain't
I working for my fee? And I tell you I'm going to charge you a
rattling big one, too, when I can shake hands with you as a millionaire
and better on the sidewalk in front of this State eleemosynary
Institution!"

"You talk as if you had the sidewalk means in your hand," I said,
yielding a little to his enthusiasm in spite of my suspicions of him
and my feeble efforts to stand alone.

"I have!" he announced oracularly. "I have here"--slapping a second
folded paper which he had drawn from his pocket--"I have here a
petition for your free and unconditional pardon, addressed to the
Governor and signed by the trial judge, the prosecuting attorney, and
by ten of the twelve members of the jury. Oh, I tell you, young man,
I've been busy these last three days. You may have been setting me
down as a hard-hearted old lawyer, toughened to all these things, Bert,
but when I read that newspaper story, of how you were kidnapped, as you
may say--torn from the arms of a loving wife and dragged aboard of a
train and railroaded back to p