still worth their face value, though the mortgage securing the debt
which they represented had long since been foreclosed and the money
distributed.

"I'd paid for 'em--actual cash," he rambled on. "Not much, to be
sure--but real money. If I got 'em cheap that was my good luck, wasn't
it? It was because my brain was sharper than other folks'! I said they
had value and I say so now--only nobody will believe it or take the
trouble to find out. I learned a lot up there in Sing Sing too," he
continued, warming to his subject. "Do you know, sir, there are fortunes
lying all about us? Take gold, for instance! There's a fraction of a
grain in every ton of sea water. But the big people don't want it taken
out because it would depress the standard of exchange. I say it's a
conspiracy--and yet they jailed a man for it! There's great mineral
deposits all about just waiting for the right man to come along and
develop 'em."

His lifted eye rested upon the engraving of Abraham Lincoln over Mr.
Tutt's desk. "There was a man!" he exclaimed inconsequently; then
stopped and ran his transparent, heavily veined old hand over his
forehead. "Where was I? Let me see. Oh, yes--gold. All those great
properties could be bought at one time or another for a song. It needed
a pioneer! That's what I was--a pioneer to find the gold where other
people couldn't find it. That's not any crime; it's a service to
humanity! If only they'd have a little faith--instead of locking you up.
The judge never looked up the law about those Great Lakes bonds! If he
had he'd have found out I was right! I'd looked it up. I studied law
once myself."

"I know," said Mr. Tutt, almost moved to tears by the sight of the wreck
before him. "You practised up state, didn't you?"

"Yes," responded Doc Barrows eagerly. "And in Chicago too. I'm a member
of the Cook County bar. I'll tell you something! If the Supreme Court of
Illinois hadn't been wrong in its law I'd be the richest man in the
world--in the whole world!" He grabbed Mr. Tutt by the arm and stared
hard into his eyes. "Didn't I show you my papers? I own seven feet of
water front clean round Lake Michigan all through the city of Chicago I
got it for a song from the man who found out the flaw in the original
title deed of 1817; he was dying. 'I'll sell my secret to you,' he says,
'because I'm passing on. May it bring you luck!' I looked it all up and
it was just as he said. So I got up a corporation--The Chicago Wate