against you?"

Henry's eyes shifted. "Has he got anything against me? He bought a good
lease and was wise enough to get somebody to make a well for him--"

"Those crooks! Those wildcatters!"

"Now, he proposes to develop his acreage as rapidly as possible.
Nothing strange about that, is there?"

"Is he sore at you?"

"We didn't get along very well in France."

"Humph! I suppose that means you fought like hell. And now he's getting
even. By the way, where am I going to get this money?"

"That is up to you," said Henry, with a disagreeable grin, whereupon
his father stamped into his own office in a fine fury.

Not long after this father and son quarreled again, for of a sudden a
perfect avalanche of lawsuits was released, the mysterious origin and
purpose of which completely mystified Old Bell. The Nelsons, like
everybody else, had unsuccessfully dabbled in oil stocks and drilling
companies for some time before the boom started, also during its early
stages, and most of those failures had been forgotten. They were
painfully brought to mind, however, when Henry was served with a dozen
or more citations, and when inquiry elicited the reluctant admission
from the bank's attorney that a genuine liability existed--a liability
which included the entire debts of those defunct joint-stock
associations in which he and his father had invested. This was enough
to enrage a saint.

Henry argued that he had invariably signed those articles of
association with the words, in parentheses, "No personal liability,"
and he was genuinely amazed to learn that this precaution had been
useless. He protested that scores--nay, hundreds--of other people were
in the same fix as he, and that if this outrageous provision of the law
were strictly enforced and judgments rendered widespread ruin would
result. His lawyer agreed to this in all sympathy, but read aloud the
provisions of the statute, and Nelson derived no comfort from the
reading. The lawyer was curious to know, by the way, who had taken the
trouble to acquire all of these claims--a task of heroic size--but
about all the encouragement he could offer was the probability of a
long and expensive series of legal battles, the outcome of which was
problematical. That meant annoyance, at best, and a possible impairment
of credit, and the Nelson credit right now was a precious thing, as
Henry well knew. Eloquently he cursed the day he had met Calvin Gray.
What next, he wondered.

He dis