mple,--not making much this year, you say, and mortgaged up pretty
well, besides. Well! Just when he's probably getting worried about his
book-keeping, down you drop on him and ask him as a favor to you to put
up a new building, which is practically what--"

"He'll have to do it, too. If he don't do it now, I'll have a law next
year that'll get him right in the neck."

"Exactly. _But_--mark my words, he won't wait for the law, now that
we've got this drift going. Don't you be deceived by what he may say now
in--in pique. Give him a little chance to adjust himself to the new
idea, that's all. Rome wasn't built in a day, Sam--as you've said."

"Look here, old horse, what's struck you?"

"How do you mean, what's struck me?"

The two young men gazed at each other.

"You're pipin' a mighty different tune than you were when you wrote that
letter. I've noticed it for some time."

The look of the fine-skinned young man at the desk changed perceptively.
O'Neill was made to feel that his remark was in questionable taste, to
say the least of it.

"I wish you wouldn't speak as if I were a band of travelling bagmen. I'm
not piping or tuning in any way. I say now precisely what I've said all
along. Rouse these people to their responsibilities, and you can tear up
your factory laws! Different cases require different methods of--"

"Why, last fall--"

"Now, Sam--here! Arguing's no good--I'll tell you what. Suppose you just
leave Heth's to me. Go ahead and hammer the Pickle people if you think
that'll do the slightest good. But you leave Heth's to me for a while."

"Well! That's an order," said the Commissioner, somewhat derisively,
yet looking interested, too. "And what'll you do with them?"

"All that I care to say at present," replied the tall doctor, apparently
choosing his words with care, "is that I--ah--feel everything's going to
work out very satisfactorily in that quarter."

O'Neill stared at him, the gubernatorial cigar forgotten. "Oho!...
You've met the Heths personally?" "I've met some of them personally, as
you call it,--far as that goes."

O'Neill, puffing again, digested this information speculatively.
Presently he looked knowing and laughed.

"Say, remember my saying to you, time you wrote that letter, that if you
knew any of these yellow captains and horse-leeches' daughters
personally, you'd feel mighty different--"

"But I don't! I don't! You don't seem to get me at all, Sam. I've just
shown that my