no bowels or mercies and would snatch away the widow's
mite and leave her and her consumptive daughter to die in the poorhouse.
Yet such was the case, and there they all were! Could you blame people
for being Bolsheviks? And yet old Doc Barrows was as far from a
Bolshevik as anyone could well be.

Mr. Tutt passed a restless night, dreaming, when he slept at all, of
mines from which poured myriads of pieces of yellow gold, of gushers
spouting columns of blood-red oil hundreds of feet into the air, and of
old-fashioned locomotives dragging picturesque trains of cars across
bright green prairies studded with cacti in the shape of dollar signs.
Old Doc Barrows was with him, and from time to time he would lean toward
him and whisper "Listen, Mr. Tutt, I'll tell you a secret! There's a
vein of gold runs right through my daughter's cow pasture!"

When Willie next morning at half past eight reached the office he found
the door already unlocked and Mr. Tutt busy at his desk, up to his
elbows in a great mass of bonds and stock certificates.

"Gee!" he exclaimed to Miss Sondheim, the stenographer, when she made
her appearance at a quarter past nine. "Just peek in the old man's door
if you want to feel rich! Say, he must ha' struck pay dirt! I wonder if
we'll all get a raise?"

But all the securities on Mr. Tutt's desk would not have justified even
the modest advance of five dollars in Miss Sondheim's salary, and their
employer was merely sorting out and making an inventory of Doc Barrows'
imaginary wealth. By the time Mrs. Effingham arrived by appointment at
ten o'clock he had them all arranged and labeled; and in a special
bundle neatly tied with a piece of red tape were what on their face were
securities worth upward of seventy thousand dollars. There were ten of
the beautiful bonds of the Great Lakes and Canadian Southern Railroad
Company with their miniature locomotives and fields of wheat, and ten
equally lovely bits of engraving belonging to the long-since defunct
Bluff Creek and Iowa Central, ten more superb lithographs issued by the
Mohawk and Housatonic in 1867 and paid off in 1882, and a variety of
gorgeous chromos of Indians and buffaloes, and of factories and
steamships spouting clouds of soft-coal smoke; and on the top of all was
a pile of the First Mortgage Gold Six Per Cent obligations of the
Chicago Water Front and Terminal Company--all of them fresh and crisp,
with that faintly acrid smell which though not agr