is feet. What he said was: "Where'n hell's
my hat?"

But by the time he had found the hat and the door he mended his manners.

"I say, 'Thank you a thousand times,'" he shouted over his shoulder.
"Excuse me, but I've got to go. I've got to break the news to--"

He did not explain to whom he was going to break the news; but Hastings
must have guessed, for again he sighed happily and then, a little
hysterically laughed aloud. Several months had passed since he had
laughed aloud.

In his anxiety to break the news Champ Thorne almost broke his neck. In
his excitement he could not remember whether the red flash meant the
elevator was going down or coming up, and sooner than wait to find out
he started to race down eighteen flights of stairs when fortunately the
elevator-door swung open.

"You get five dollars," he announced to the elevator man, "if you drop
to the street without a stop. Beat the speed limit! Act like the
building is on fire and you're trying to save me before the roof falls."

* * * * *

Senator Barnes and his entire family, which was his daughter Barbara,
were at the Ritz-Carlton. They were in town in August because there was
a meeting of the directors of the Brazil and Cuyaba Rubber Company, of
which company Senator Barnes was president. It was a secret meeting.
Those directors who were keeping cool at the edge of the ocean had been
summoned by telegraph; those who were steaming across the ocean, by
wireless.

Up from the equator had drifted the threat of a scandal, sickening,
grim, terrible. As yet it burned beneath the surface, giving out only an
odor, but an odor as rank as burning rubber itself. At any moment it
might break into flame. For the directors, was it the better wisdom to
let the scandal smoulder, and take a chance, or to be the first to give
the alarm, the first to lead the way to the horror and stamp it out?

It was to decide this that, in the heat of August, the directors and the
president had forgathered.

Champ Thorne knew nothing of this; he knew only that by a miracle
Barbara Barnes was in town; that at last he was in a position to ask her
to marry him; that she would certainly say she would. That was all he
cared to know.

A year before he had issued his declaration of independence. Before he
could marry, he told her, he must be able to support a wife on what he
earned, without her having to accept money from her father, and until he
receiv