sed you I'd
stick to the straight and narrow. I'll keep my word. Nothing but
straight business for me hereafter."

He, too, was quite serious about it, and yet he smiled as he thought
of young Corbin. Another man, of a party just being shown to a table,
nodded to him, and Mrs. Wallingford looked up at her husband with
admiration.

"Honestly, how do you do it?" she inquired. "We have only been here a
little over forty-eight hours, and yet you have already picked up a
host of nice friends."

"I patronize only the best saloons," he replied with a grin; then,
more seriously: "This is a mighty rich little city, Fannie. I could
organize a stock company here, within a week, for anything from a
burglar's trust to a church consolidation."

"It's a pretty place," she admitted. "I like it very much from what I
have seen of it."

He chuckled.

"Looks like a spending town," he returned; "and where they spend a wad
they're crazy to make one. Give me one of these inland society towns
for the loose, long green. New York's no place to start an honest
business," and again he chuckled. "By the way, Fannie," he added after
a pause, "what do you think of my going into the patent medicine
line?"

"How do you mean?" she inquired, frowning.

"Oh, on a big scale," he replied. "Advertise it big, manufacture it
big."

She studied it over in musing silence.

"I don't mind what you do so long as it is honest," she finally said.

"Good. I'll hunt up Quagg to-morrow and spring it on him."

"You don't mean that dreadful quack medicine he's selling on the
street, do you?" she protested.

"Why not? I don't know that it's worthless, and I do know that Quagg
has sold it on street corners for twenty years from coast to coast. He
goes back to the same towns over and over, and people buy who always
bought before. Looks like a good thing to me. Quagg was a regular
doctor when he was a kid; had a real diploma and all that, but no
practice and no patience. Joke. Giggle."

The oysters came on now, and they talked of other things, but while
they were upon the meat Doctor Lazzier, having finished, came across
to shake hands with his friend of a day, and was graciously charmed to
meet Mrs. Wallingford.

"Sit down," invited J. Rufus. "Won't you try a glass of this? It's
very fair," and he raised a practised eyebrow to the waiter.

The doctor delicately pushed down the edge of the ice-wet napkin
until he could see the label, and he gave an invo