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 "Surest thing!" boasted George, and in a sudden release of animal spirits long pent up, he seized his mother in his arms, swung her clear off the floor, and spun round with that scandalized lady stretched almost horizontal. He laughed boisterously as he let her down.

"It seems so good, George, to hear you laugh," panted his mother when things had quieted somewhat. "Seems as though as you grow up you grow kind of hard. You just smile and smile kind of cunning like a possum but you don't laugh any more. You're just all business."

"I suppose I'll laugh all the time now," responded George, "for I've just sold out my business."

"Sold it out?" exclaimed the mother, almost in alarm, while the bearded mouth of Malachi fell open in surprise and remained a gaping orifice that demanded to be filled with some sort of explanation.

"Lock, stock, and barrel!" declared George.

"Hum!" mused his father, recovering somewhat from the shock of his surprise and pulling at his beard. "What you going to take up now?"

"It isn't settled yet," said George. "But something big, you bet!"

Neither parent had a doubt of that. Leaving them puzzled, to look into each other's eyes questioningly, yet nodding and glowing or

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 chuckling with pride, George went back to town and sold the horse and buggy.

"The day of the horse is over," he said to himself, but required the man who had bought the outfit to drive him to the shop of Milton Morris on Franklin Street.

But where, by the way, was Charlie King? In Paris—painting pictures. Where was his factory? He had none—at this time. That George did not have himself driven to the factory of R. E. Olds instead merely showed his independence. Olds had the great successful factory; it became the school from which graduated so many able men into the ranks of the industry, but for reasons which seemed good to him young Judson's choice had fallen upon Milton Morris.

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T will be remembered that Mr. Morris had asked, not too cordially, "What can I do for you?"

"I want a job as a demonstrator," replied George.

"Gad!" ejaculated Mr. Morris impatiently. "Is there a young fellow in Detroit that doesn't? They come in here twenty a day."

Now some salesmen talk too much. George Judson had learned better. To this impatient remark he offered no comment. He merely stood gazing expectantly at Mr. Morris, reinforcing his appeal for a job with the plea of his earnest eyes and the quiet persistence of his manner, selling himself without a word. Mr. Morris felt this. It compelled him to parley.

"Know anything about gasoline engines? Anything about automobiles?" he plumped.

"No," confessed the young man honestly, "but I've ridden in every automobile built in Detroit, and the best ride I got was in a Milton Morris. Anyhow my business is selling. I know how to get people to buy things."

"Gad! That's the point!" conceded Mr. Morris, who was secretly aggrieved that Olds

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 should sell so many cars while his few stood in the warehouse. "You've got the right idea at least. I've a couple of young demonstrators now, and they just smell up the whole town with gasoline, while the warehouse stays full of cars." The door was open, and Mr. Morris pointed with his pencil to where six spick and span new cars stood awaiting a buyer. That was his idea of "full."

"What are you asking for those cars out there?" inquired George, feeling that he was making headway.

"One thousand dollars apiece—too much money for this man's town," frowned the manufacturer.

"Mr. Morris!" The tone of George's voice had been lowered almost to solemnity, and he advanced and leaned a hand impressively upon the big, littered desk. "I am about to make you a proposition that may sound fresh, but I don't mean it that way. I want you to give me two weeks to sell those six cars. If I sell them all in that time, give me fifty dollars apiece commission. If I don't sell them all, I've worked two weeks for you for nothing." George straightened and stepped back from the desk.

Milton Morris sat a moment rather breathless, taking in George again with his eye and his proposition with his mind—a proposition which in his experience, was unique.

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 "When can I start?" urged George.

"Now!—by jingo!" said Mr. Morris. "You can't bluff me. I like your nerve, too, young fellow. It will take you far. Anderson! Anderson!"

A lank, round-shouldered Swede with grease and grime spotting and streaking his overalls from head to foot appeared in the door leading to the shop.

"Take an hour off. Anderson, and give Mr. Judson a driving lesson," his boss directed.

The Swede looked at his employer and gave meek-eyed assent. Then he looked at George and jerked his head shop-ward.

"How's that young fellow getting along, Anderson?" it occurred to Mr. Morris to ask after a couple of hours, as his assembly foreman sauntered in for some instructions.

"He's drivin' the car all right, but you can't learn him nothing. Couldn't tell him nothing at all after the first five minutes. Wants to figure it out for himself. He's got her all apart out there now."

"All apart?" exclaimed Mr. Morris in some alarm. "Is he a mechanic?"

"Says not. Says you can't never sell a thing, though, till you understand it, know what makes it perform and all that."

"That's kind of sensible," admitted Mr. Morris, and getting up, he strolled out on the

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 warehouse floor, where he found young Judson in a pair of borrowed overalls, with sleeves rolled up, grease and dirt to his elbows and his ears, engaged in prying into the mysteries of the Milton Morris automobile.

Secretly this pleased Mr. Morris. "Couldn't get one of these other dudes even to take an oil can in his hand," he remarked to himself.

For three days thereafter George appeared in overalls and flannel shirt. On the fourth day he was a clothing store model in appearance. He sold the sixth car on the tenth day of active salesmanship.

"Holy Zachariah!" exclaimed Mr. Morris. "You're selling 'em faster than we can make 'em. About eight or ten a month is as fast as we can turn 'em out."

"Couldn't you double the force and enlarge the shop?" suggested the young man modestly and yet hopefully.

This was rather cool, but Mr. Morris did not resent it. Instead he gazed thoughtfully, although with an expression half-humorous on his finely graven face.

"How do you do it? Sell 'em so easy, I mean?" he speculated.

"It's simple. All salesmanship is simple," expatiated George. "Just make the other fellow want the thing you're selling. Make him want it, and he'll do the rest. It is simple, sir . ..

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 Mr. Morris!" and there was that respectful dropping of the voice which, with him, always preceded the making of any important proposal. "Mr. Morris, I believe if I took a little lope around the country, I believe I could get a bunch of orders for spring delivery, and we would be able to go ahead on a definite plan of expansion for the factory."

Who had said anything about expansion? And yet Milton Morris, sitting here, trying to dig in with his toes and hold back, felt himself being pushed—absolutely pushed—into contemplation of the idea.

Just how good a talker the young man was, Mr. Morris was beginning to realize. "Let's wait a year. You're pushing me on too fast. Besides, I haven't got the money to spare for the trip."

"I've got a little money," confided George, his eyes shining. "I ask you, Mr. Morris, to let me advance myself five hundred dollars on the firm's account. I believe in the future of the automobile, and I believe especially in your car and in you."

This was irresistible. "Go ahead, George, and convince yourself," said Milton Morris indulgently, and threw up his hands, then admitted: "If you could scare up twenty-five or thirty orders, it would sort of give us something to plan on."

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Rh And on the morrow evening, though it was pouring with rain, Mr. Bons did not omit to call at Agathox Lodge.

The boy was ready, bubbling with excitement, and skipping about in a way that rather vexed the President of the Literary Society. They took a turn down Buckingham Park Road, and then—having seen that no one was watching them—slipped up the alley. Naturally enough (for the sun was setting) they ran straight against the omnibus.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed Mr. Bons. "Good gracious heavens!"

It was not the omnibus in which the boy had driven first, nor yet that in which he had returned. There were three horses—black, gray, and white, the gray being the finest. The driver, who turned round at the mention of goodness and of heaven, was a sallow man with terrifying jaws and sunken eyes. Mr. Bons, on seeing him, gave a cry as if of recognition, and began to tremble violently.

The boy jumped in.

"Is it possible?" cried Mr. Bons. "Is the impossible possible?"

"Sir; come in, sir. It is such a fine omnibus. Oh, here is his name—Dan some one."


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 George nodded, well pleased with himself, and was blithely happy as he took the train. He had never been outside the city of Detroit except for a few little daylight excursions. He had never ridden in a sleeping car. He was unfamiliar with just how one goes to a hotel and registers and deports oneself, but the morning of life was bright upon him. Not a doubt or a misgiving entered his mind. He was a bearer of good tidings to the world.

At the end of the fifth week he was back.

"Mr. Morris!" exclaimed George, all brakes off and unable to keep the exultant leap out of his voice. "I sold one hundred and two automobiles." He transferred a huge wallet of signed contracts from his pocket to the scarred and cluttered desk.

Mr. Morris's face, instead of joy, expressed consternation. His cheeks became ashen. "And contracted to deliver them?"

"Before June first."

"My Lord, boy! You have ruined us! Why, where on earth would I get the money to buy the material and pay the wages?"

"I've got part of it here," assured George most amazingly, and holding up a single contract he called attention to a pink slip with perforated edges attached. It was a draft for $333.33, one-third of the price of a Milton

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 Morris automobile. There was one attached to every contract.

"But one hundred before June first?" the older man reflected as he filled his pipe. "I'm not so sure it can be done."

"Done? You've got to do it, Mr. Morris. I've sold 'em!"

This was almost autocratic. George said it like an autocrat, too, with a thump of his doubled fist upon the table. But Mr. Morris did not seem to notice.

"We can make 'em, I guess," he decided, "but we'll have to have more money even than this thirty-three thousand you've brought home. Thirty-three thousand! Can I believe it? I reckon, though, I can take those orders down to my bank and borrow twenty-five thousand on the strength of them."

But again George Judson thumped the table. "No, Mr. Morris," he objected squarely. "No! We won't make any little piker loan like that."

This time Mr. Morris observed the thump and the autocratic note. "Don't let a little success spoil you, George," he warned.

"I'll try not to," said the young salesman, flushing. "But don't you realize that if I sold one hundred automobiles in five weeks, I could sell a thousand automobiles in twelve months?"

"A—a thousand!" Mr. Morris murmured the word hoarsely, then leaned back and gaped, his

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 startled, recessed eyes seeming to advance and gleam furtively in their sockets.

"Don't you know that Olds has sold four thousand cars this very season?"

"But Olds—Olds." Milton Morris sat forward again, floundering with his arms, as if he also floundered in his mind. "Olds has got the jump on us. Besides, that was just a freak demand. Nobody will ever sell four thousand cars again in any one year."

"Pardon me if I seem to contradict your judgment, Mr. Morris," said George suavely, "but there is a man in Detroit now offering to contract for one thousand cars for spring delivery for the New York City agency alone. I tell you the world is hungry for automobiles. Look at these!" The young man lifted the contracts and fiuttered them with their drafts attached. "Mr. Morris, do you know what you are going to do, you and I?"

Milton Morris had not a notion. Leaning back, rather helpless now, he had a craven feeling that however absurd the proposal, he would accept it.

George was going on: "We're going to build not one hundred and two, but one thousand one hundred and two cars, and have them ready for delivery next season. You build 'em. I sell 'em."

"By Gad, I believe you could sell 'em all

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 right," conceded Mr. Morris with something like a gasp.

He had been secretly piqued that Olds and Ford could sell their cars while he had not sold his. The thing which George had just done tickled his natural and perfectly justifiable vanity. The thing George proposed to do tickled it still more—while it staggered him.

"I could build 'em, too," he decided, "if we had the money."

"Mr. Morris," said George speaking slowly, trying to strain out of his tones anything of overweening self-conceit, "I say it modestly but firmly—solemnly—I believe I can get the money. Manufacturing is your end; selling is mine. I'll go down here and sell ourselves to the banks for a couple of hundred thousand dollars—that's what I'll do. You go to work on the basis of turning out eleven hundred cars by June 30th. I'll find the money."

Under the spell of the younger man's enthusiastic dream the eyes of the older lighted, and his blood began to tingle. For a moment at least he saw the vision himself, the vision of the automobile—making smooth the road and short the way from every man's door to every mart of trade or pleasure—a new pastime and a new service to mankind, a bringing of the country to the city and the city to the country, a retaking of the world in the name of humanity.

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 He saw the vision, but the light was toned down in his face and the tingle went out of his blood as, true to habit, his mind came back to concern itself with a concrete, individualized task.

"You're young, George," he said, gazing at the ardent salesman with a look of such sublime faith that it failed utterly to realize how young he was. "You've got an awful lot of pep, but it's an awful big job you've cut out for yourself, going down to get money out of these hardheaded old Detroit bankers on nothing but a shoestring tied to a sizzling gasoline engine."

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EXT day when, carrying his sheaf of orders with drafts attached for one hundred and two M. M. automobiles, George Judson began to visit the bankers, he found that Mr. Morris's pessimism was well-founded. Yet these bankers knew all about Olds' second year. They had heard that he was selling four thousand cars and would show a cash surplus of $600,000 for the twelve months. But that was Olds. New men and new machines—that was different; that was not an investment, it was a gamble, and bankers were not gamblers—so they told him.

After three days of industrious assault upon the bulwarks of finance the only real encouragement lay in the fact that while none of these bankers could believe in young Mr. Judson's scheme which he talked so enthusiastically, every one of them came within a few minutes to believe in young Mr. Judson himself. There was, for instance, Stephen Gilman. He was the distinguished president of the great St. Clair Trust Company and quite imposing to look upon. He was tall, with a high, narrow fore-

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 head over brows that were aggressively and contrastingly black, for his thin and slightly wavy hair was snow-white and parted in the middle as if to heighten that suggestion of balanced probity which was subtly conveyed by every detail of the banker's appearance.

"Who are you, young man?" he asked with an amused smile. "You're the best talker that has sat down in that chair in a long time, I'll say that for you. Your proposition is sound enough, too. I'll tell you that if—"

"You're the first banker that has had the discernment to see that," broke in George gratefully.

"Hold on a minute," warned Mr. Gilman. "I said 'if.' If you could convince me that there's any such wide-spread hunger for horseless carriages as you say. I've never even ridden in one of the treacherous things myself."

"Mr. Gilman," proposed George in quiet seriousness, "I will pay all your expenses and supply you with the best accommodations obtainable if you will go out with me to, say, Lincoln or Sioux City, or if they are too far away, Kankakee; and if in either one of those places I do not take ten orders for our cars in seven days, why then I'll admit that I am mistaken about the future of the horseless carriage. If I do sell them, will you not revise your opinion, give serious consideration to my proposal,

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 and induce other financial powers in the city to do the same?"

George was serious enough—no doubt of it; yet Mr. Gilman only smiled at the naïve proposal.

"How old are you?" he asked curiously.

"Twenty-two," admitted George, weak enough to be proud of his youth when computed solely in years.

"Hm!" said Mr. Gilman, in surprise. "You talk older."

"Perhaps that's because I've had responsibility and a lot of experience of what you might call small salesmanship."

"What responsibility?" inquired the banker, shrewdly feeling after the answer to those broad yet deeply penetrative questions he had asked a while ago.

George told him—as briefly as possible, yet as fully as necessary to be polite—told him the story of his business experience, the paper routes, the news-stands, the slowly worked-out high school course and his devoted interest in the automobile; also the sound reason why he had selected the Milton Morris vehicle in particular for his most serious business venture. Under the spell of a further cordial interest, he even told about the house he was now building for his father and mother with whom he still lived, and about

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 the twelve or thirteen thousand dollars now on deposit in Mr. Gilman's own bank.

"Humph!" said Mr. Gilman again, when he had heard him through to this important piece of information. "You pay me a subtle compliment."

"My gas wagon's just out in front. Won't you let me run you out the avenue and back?" pleaded George earnestly. "It'll do you good to get a little fresh air. It will be in the way of business, too, for I think I can make you understand something of the fascination there is in a spin in an automobile."

"And on the basis of that fascination, you want me to loan you two hundred thousand dollars?" speculated Mr. Gilman, an amused light in his shrewd eye.

"Not on your fascination. On the general fascination, of the reality of which you may judge when you have experienced it yourself."

"Help! Help!" laughed Mr. Gilman. "But I'll go with you."

As the two men appeared in the rather exposed position reserved for the passengers on the single-seated, two-cylindered runabout of that day, the pair provided a striking contrast. Yet George, as he guided the car out Griswold Street toward Jefferson Avenue, had no sense of contrasts. He felt very much on even terms.

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 "Goes easy, doesn't it?" observed Mr. Gilman, analyzing his sensations.

"Gasoline does the pulling," smiled George.

"Why, I don't notice the smell of gasoline at all," recalled the banker.

This was the day when the standard joke was about the automobile and the standard joke about the automobile was the joke about the smell.

"Pooh! There isn't any smell," asserted George, opening the throttle a bit wider. "If there is, the other fellow gets it."

They were spinning out the avenue eastward now, with the gleam of the river every now and then before their eyes and with the fresh, tangy ozone of early autumn sharp in their nostrils.

"How fast are we going?" inquired Mr. Gilman.

"Faster than your carriage horses would be going if they were running away," declared George.

"Trying to sell me one of these things, aren't you?"

"Trying to sell you my faith in our ability to sell eleven hundred of these cars this year and five thousand next," amended George with a contrasting soberness that was instantly effective.

"Well," retorted the banker, "I admit the fas-

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 cination anyway, and I guess we had better turn around now and make for the office."

"Very well, sir," George responded, perfectly agreeable, yet with just the proper suggestion of reluctance, and prepared to bring the vehicle about.

But a street car, wheel flanges already setting up their hideous shriek, was just rounding the corner, and this complicated matters. This, however, would give George an opportunity to demonstrate both his skill and the easy control of the car. Puffed with self-confidence, he began to swing the wheels, but. . . there was a milk wagon speeding along behind that street car, piled high with full cans, drawn by two wild horses, with reins held by a fat Swiss who was practically asleep upon the seat. The horses, knowing from long habit whither they were bound, took it upon themselves to dodge around the street car and cut the wrong way to the turn. When George saw them, it was too late.

"Hold on tight," he shouted to Mr. Gilman, and himself braced for a shock. There followed an awful eternity of suspense that lasted perhaps as long as a split second, after which horses, automobile, street car, slumbering Swiss, and bursting cans of foamy milk spontaneously combined in a moving picture of disaster! . ..

Taking account of casualties: the street car

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 was uninjured, while the milk wagon seemed a total loss. The sturdy little automobile, substantial as the character of Milton Morris himself, had plowed straight through it and over it, halting, careened against a trolley pole, with the two wheels on one side spinning idly a few inches from the ground. The horses, kicking themselves free of the wreckage with frightened snorts, dashed madly off. The Swiss driver woke up, took one look at the chaos round him, and plunged wildly away. George was still clinging stoutly to his wheel, but Mr. Gilman had disappeared.

"My Lord! Oh, my Lord!" groaned the young man, out of the chaos, but just then there began a mysterious agitation among the milk cans. George, who by this time had crawled down from his seat, began frantically to toss the cans aside. He found his late passenger underneath, drenched by the white fluid.

"Mr. Gilman!" he cried in anguished concern, "are you hurt?"

"I think not," replied the banker in tones of thick disgust that issued through a film of milk. "No, not hurt!" but as he said it, his verdict was contradicted by a widening circle of crimson which appeared about a contused wound over his right eye.

"Oh, but you are!" discovered George in deepening distress. "You are. My Lord! This is

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 awful!" And with an arm under the banker's aristocratic shoulders he helped him to his feet.

"Better take me home, I guess," gasped Mr. Gilman, and he mentioned a location on the Lake Shore Drive in Grosse Pointe.

"Have you there in twenty minutes, sir," assured George, relieved by the opportunity to do something quick, and gave the leaning automobile a vigorous push.

With a lurch the little car righted—not an axle bent, not a wheel sprung, standing as four square to the world as she had stood the morning out of the factory. Yet George was naturally apprehensive as he gave the crank a twist, but the engine started with a sound like the whir of a flock of grouse.

However, Mr. Gilman was viewing with alarm. "Not going to ask me to get in that thing again, are you?" he inquired with a slight show of irritation.

"It's the best transportation available, sir," George said; "it'll have you home in twenty minutes. I hope you don't blame the little car," he added dismally.

"No, no," said Mr. Gilman snappily, "and I don't blame you either, young man. I blame myself. They are treacherous things, these devil-wagons!"

Something boiled in George's breast, but he held it in. Tact, delicacy, consideration—all

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 warned that this was no time to start an argument. Besides his passenger began to display an alarming weakness. He wobbled in his seat, and the young man slipped an arm unobtrusively round him where assistance could be prompt if he should faint, and steered skillfully with one hand, making toward Grosse Pointe with all speed possible over the rather poor dirt road.

"My Lord! I wonder if he's dying!" the young man groaned in anxiety, whereat old Stephen roused enough to gasp grimly.

"Not yet—small thanks to you."

However again came contradiction of his stout words. His head dropped and he was off again until the car had come to a stop under the porte cochère.

But the approach of the little car had been noted by some eye in the great stone house; the banker's inert form had been recognized, and instant alarm been taken. A butler came running down the granite steps, leaving the door wide open behind him, and between the two men Mr. Gilman suffered himself to be lowered and half-borne upward to his hall.

"A glass of Scotch, Bolton, quick!" the banker gasped and indicated his desire to be eased into a chair, where he sat waiting for the stimulant with his head in his hand.

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 disappointedly, when a startled exclamation issued from somewhere above, and George's eyes turned to where an impressive staircase lifted itself to the floor above.

In the angle of the balustrade a girl had halted for swift appraisal of the scene, her face a vision of immature loveliness on which bewilderment and alarm were pictured. She wore a dainty frock of some half-clinging blue stuff. Her brown, wavy hair was done precociously high, her figure was a combination of girlish slants and womanly curves; but the oval face was white with fright, and blue, startled eyes swept the faces below.

"Papa!" she cried, and with winged feet came fluttering down. "You are hurt!"

Her manner was all tenderness and impulsive affection, all concern and anxiety. Her arms were about her father's neck in an instant. She was kissing the uncrimsoned area upon his brow, then turning appealing eyes upon the servants with impatient gestures and reproachful pleadings:

"Do something—can't you, some of you—quickly," she urged. "Jean, telephone for mama!"

This appeared the only specific thing she could suggest, and her eyes turned once more eagerly upon her father with, "What was it, father? How did it happen?"

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 The half-closed eyes of Stephen Gilman, leaning back weakly, waiting for his Scotch, regarded his daughter with a slight but reassuring smile. "Not exactly hurt, Fay, dear; just bumped is all," he succeeded in saying, when the Scotch arrived, and he gulped it gratefully.

All this time George Judson, fallen completely in the background, had been staring at the girl. She reminded him of a Persian kitten, soft, furry, loving, and she started some strange memory in him that was like a waking of the long, long past. He was staring at her—staring with all his eyes.

The reviving Scotch brought Mr. Gilman around considerably.

"Bolton, you and Morely help me upstairs," he directed, and, his arms upon the shoulders of his butler and his valet, had begun to mount with his daughter anxiously ahead, when, despite pain and anxiety, there occurred to him his duty to the author of his misfortune, the duty to be courteous and even magnanimous.

"Fay," he said and shifted slowly till his eye could contemplate that distressed person by the door, "this is a young friend of mine, Mr. Judson. He was good enough to bring me home—er—uh—after the accident. Thank him, won't you?"

The girl darted her first appraising glance at the young man her father's nod had indicated.

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 She saw him—symmetrical, well-favored, concerned, and wistful—and decided that he was a person to be instantly approved and highly appreciated. With a little cry of dismay as though she had been indifferent to one to whom she was under obligations of gratitude, she came impulsively down to him.

"I am so grateful to you—so grateful!" she cried, and took his hand and for a moment held it warmly.

It was the unstudied, artless expression of a distressed and simple heart, utterly devoid of self-consciousness, and as such beautiful and appealing. But the effect produced was beyond the cause. George Judson stood swaying—for he had recognized her. This was the Goat Girl—this was his velvet queen. She had grown into this half-wild, half-tamed, exquisite, frightened, wonderful thing that he wanted upon the instant to take into his arms and soothe and love.

He could have dropped upon the floor and offered up a prayer of thanksgiving. His hand burned where she had touched it. The electric thrill of that personal contact was shooting through him. Some delicate perfume that came close to him with her enveloped him and made him giddy.

"Just what happened, Mr. Judson?" the girl asked.

"He was driving with me. A milk wagon ran

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 us down. He got a fall and something struck him. I am sure the first thing for me now is to bring a doctor. I have my car here, you know."

George Judson was saying these things quite glibly, but hardly knowing that he uttered them. Her golden hair had darkened, her soft, child prettiness had become girlishly mobile and variant, and her milk-white complexion had deepened to a creamy yet delicate orchid tint, but the radiant blue of her eyes was still the same.

"That's the thing—bring a doctor," emphasized the girl with an impatient movement of her body. "Get Doctor Rigdon from the Sheldon Building. I'll telephone him you are on the way."

George had to pull himself together to remember that this was in answer to his own proposal.

But while ecstasies and sickening fears alternately possessed George Judson's mind, the little car was bumping frantically over the old dirt road. The life of Stephen Gilman had become all at once doubly precious to George Judson. He found Doctor Rigdon waiting for him on the curb and delivered him under the Gilman marquise after a breathless, hair-raising ride.

"Gracious me!" panted the Doctor, as if he had been running. From the doorway he

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 turned. "Gracious me!" he said again and gazed at the still vibrating car.

George this time encountered a new personality in the Gilman hall, a tall, self-contained woman with traces of considerable beauty and a dignified manner.

"I am Mrs. Gilman," she said, bowing but not offering her hand. "Will you wait in the library please?"

Her voice was pleasant, but a degree north of cordial, and her manner was, well—reserved, or exclusive—something like that.

The library immediately joined in this conspiracy by awing him. There were amazing great pictures with amazing, massive, gilt frames; there were spider-legged tables of differing designs and set at varying angles; there were odd little cabinets and intriguing chests of tiny drawers, evidently old, probably far-gathered, all looking only slightly serviceable, but extremely ornamental.

But perversely this very harmony of beauty contributed an additional feeling of discomfort. It made him feel so ridiculously out of his element. Characters in the huge paintings stared him out of countenance; tiny statues ogled him or jiggled derisive fingers at him; a bronze mountain lion snarled at him, showing wicked teeth and a vicious curl of his tail.

But at length he became more accustomed to

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 his surroundings and reflected upon their significance, upon the things they told him about the people into whose home he had been abruptly pitchforked. His imagination began to work once more. These things, he perceived, were the creation not alone of wealth, but of culture, of the art of knowing what is right, of the genius-like capacity for making all things material blend themselves into a beauty that serves at the same time that it delights.

George for the moment leaned back in a Louis Quinze chair—only he did not know it was a Louis Quinze—and drew a full, exhilarating breath. But the portraits still mocked; the statues gibbered again. He—an ex-newsboy; he, an automobile salesman; he, a mere struggler for the promotion of a great business conception—he could aspire to much, and did unblinkingly; but could he aspire to—her? Now that he had seen her face to face and knew what her perfections were like to be?

For the first time in his adult life a misgiving that was more than temporary entered the mind of George Judson.

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EORGE'S chin was lowered, and he brooded. The doctor was a long time in coming downstairs. The delay was ominous, At length he heard his voice in the hall and, unbidden, hurried out to him.

"No fracture—no!" said Dr. Rigdon in a voice thoroughly professional. "Examination reveals no fracture. Patient weak from shock and some loss of blood, but nothing to apprehend. A few days rest, and he will be as good as ever."

"Thank God!" the young man murmured fervently, and with this great burden rolled from his mind, stood looking about him expectantly. Surely Fay would appear. His heart hungered for her. He needed the sight of her to confirm a thousand details his mind began to thirst for information upon. It required her radiant presence to quicken the courage of his hope and banish some of those dampening reflections in the library. But that bright flower of girlish beauty did not blossom to his yearning.

There being now no excuse to linger, George performed his last service by taking the doctor

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 away with him. As he drove, the doctor—mind relaxed of professional responsibility—talked about automobiles in general and the Milton Morris in particular—talked about it and inquired about it—but for once young Mr. Judson was a rather indifferent advocate of automobiles.

"All right," he muttered to himself when the doctor had left him, in such tones of graveyard hollowness as indicated that things were a million miles from being, as he said, all right. "AI right. Let's admit it. She doesn't remember me. I don't mean anything to her now, but I will—later. By jumping Jeminy, I will!"

Next morning Milton Morris was sitting bowed at his desk. "Hello, George!" he hailed. "How are you getting on with that loan?"

"I'm not getting on, Mr. Morris," admitted the young man hollowly and passed on to his own modest desk in the same room.

The older man gazed across at the hunched shoulders of the younger with affection in his glance. It had taken only eight weeks for that affection to grow. It had its root in the fact that Judson was the first employee who had ever manifested more faith in the business than its owner had in it himself.

"And you won't get on with it, either, George," said Mr. Morris consolingly. "The idea's too new—too uncertain. I let you run

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 away with me the other day, but in my soul I knew that I was wrong to do it. We've got to peck along slowly, making up a few cars at a time as we get the money and the orders, and watch how the cat's going to jump. We stand to make a lot of money on those orders you got."

"A lot?" he asked suspiciously. "What do you mean—a lot?"

"Ten thousand dollars or so—maybe twenty."

George coughed disdainfully and twitched impatient shoulders. "Ten thousand—twenty thousand dollars isn't anything, Mr. Morris," he announced. "I see this business in terms of millions. Millions, Mr. Morris!"

The older man gazed in silence, surprise mingling with a slight sense of irritation. The boy ought to know when he was beaten. Instead, he was bristling to argue—and the same old arguments.

"You know what Olds did last year and what he is doing this year. Besides that, Ford actually sold six hundred and seventy-four of that chicken-chaser of his, and now a lot of others are rushing into production."

"They're all nuts, every one of 'em," insisted Milton Morris testily.

"You couldn't call Henry Leland a nut, and he's into this Cadillac thing with all his heart," urged George.

"And you couldn't call Olds or Ford nuts,

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 either," admitted the other honestly and as if repenting of his irritation; "nor Henry Joy, and they tell me he's bought the Packard plant down in Ohio and is moving it up here. But the trouble is they all get to be nuts as soon as they feel a gasoline engine chugging under their feet. I tell you, George, the world hasn't gone crazy yet, and a lot of these fellows are figuring that it has. They're in, some of 'em, for the biggest kind of smash. Now let's you and me keep out of it. The gasoline buggy has got a future for it all right. There's a place for it, but it's got to be a slow development. People have got to get used to it—got to get used to how to flirt with a gasoline engine. Look at the bicycle fad and let that be a lesson to you. Let's let this thing make us some money, George, and let's don't let it lose us any."

George had to smile at the homely forceful—ness of his employer's plea, but his face and his whole manner expressed total rejection of its logic. "Mr. Morris, do you believe in me at all?" he asked.

"Shucks!" exclaimed Mr. Morris. Course I believe in you, George. You've got the best bunch of selling brains under one straw hat that's ever come past my door. I suspect you've even got the best bunch of selling brains in the whole town of Detroit."

George looked encouraged; he even blushed

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 —slightly, but immediately appealed with, "Then, Mr. Morris, for the sake of getting down to brass tacks, you lay modesty aside and admit that you're the best builder of 'em all."

"All I'll admit," qualified Mr. Morris with an embarrassed cough, "is that when it comes to hitching up gasoline to the family carriage I can see a little farther ahead mechanically than most of them probably. For instance, you'll find me putting into this batch of cars this winter some of the things that the other fellows will be putting in the winter after."

"Which is why I say," declared George, bounding to his feet, "that if Ford or Olds can sell four thousand cars in a year, by hokey, we can, even if our car does cost a few hundred more. Now, Mr. Morris, we talked last week about teaming up together and agreed that we were a team, but we didn't exactly define ourselves. Let's go ahead and do it. Let's prove our faith in our own future by organizing for it."

"Partnership?" suggested Milton Morris, not sure that he caught his drift.

"Not exactly. Not on equal terms, I mean. But here—I've been figuring it out. Suppose we organized the Morris-Judson Automobile Company and capitalized it at 250,000 shares of the par value of one dollar."

"The Morris-Judson Automobile Company,"

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 mouthed the older man slowly, as if trying out both the idea and the sound of the words.

"Yes," said George, accepting the challenge in the tone with unblinking gaze, "What do you count your shop worth—just as it stands?"

"I wouldn't have the heart to ask even the Government more than fifty thousand for it," admitted Mr. Morris.

"Let's call it fifty thousand," proposed George, eagerly. "It's worth that to the Morris-Judson Automobile Company. Now, for your name and the good-will of the business, let's add fifty thousand more. Then I'll take a hundred thousand dollars' worth of treasury stock out and sell it at par. That will give us one hundred thousand dollars in ready capital. That's enough to start those eleven hundred cars on, isn't it?"

Mr. Morris nodded a sort of incredulous and tentative approval, but thought he detected a naïve omission. "But that leaves fifty thousand shares of stock still undisposed of," he observed.

George Judson's olive skin turned a deep maroon under a wide, suffusing blush. "I thought," he hemmed, "I thought that if I sold this hundred thousand shares in the open market, and if I put ten thousand cash into the treasury myself, that you would be willing to allot me that remaining fifty thousand as my interest in

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 the business. That, you see, would secure control in our hands."

"Settled, by hokey!" said Milton Morris with a flourish of his long arm.

The next morning the lawyers were put to work. But the next afternoon George, instead of going to work to sell stock, drove out to Grosse Pointe to the home of Stephen Gilman. A gray silk dressing-gown wrapped the tall form of the banker, and he reclined upon a chaise longue, smoking a cigar comfortably and with only a patch of cotton held by adhesive strips upon a spot above his left eye to remind of the encounter with the milk-cans.

"Mr. Gilman!" George exclaimed in tones of humble delight. "I am extremely relieved to find you looking so well!"

But the banker's reception was somewhat waspish. "You realized, of course, from the moment of the accident that even the possibility of the loan was off?"

Instantly George understood. After consenting to receive him, the idea had arisen in the banker's mind that his courtesy might be taken advantage of to reopen negotiations. But—if Mr. Gilman was still holding the mere possibility of being appealed to in his mind, there still must be the faint glimmer of a hope. George saw this like a flash, and with it came a sunburst of inspiration.

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 "You concede that, of course," emphasized Mr. Gilman shrewdly, as if he could not be at ease with his caller until that matter was settled.

"I could not admit that—no, Mr. Gilman," George returned quickly; "unless I would admit that you are the kind of man who, if one bank in which he trusted had failed, would thereafter never trust any bank."

"Hey!" grunted the banker, pricked with surprise and frowning again.

"I mean, Mr. Gilman," elaborated George, his eyes glowing with earnest intent to avoid giving offense, "that you are too shrewd and too discerning a man not to have gathered in our brief ride, even though it terminated unfortunately, a certain amount of faith in and fascination for the gasoline automobile."

"Fascination, fiddlesticks!" the injured man exclaimed irritably. "I'm sick to death with automobiles and with hearing about them."

"It's this way, Mr. Gilman," George explained, ingratiatingly. "We are engaged in the manufacture of one of civilization's greatest necessities. Once civilization gets it, all business, all pleasure, all comfort will roll along faster. Just that little experience of yours last night should convince you. You were injured—let us forget how—and it is an automobile that conveys you swiftly and safely to your home. It is an automobile that brings your family phy-

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 sician. Everything needful from a hospital's emergency equipment is rolled swiftly to your door."

Mr. Gilman was beginning to grow restless and to look about him as if seeking means of escape. "It's no use," he said and obviously he summoned resolution. "I may begin to see what you call the 'vision' myself, but bankers and credits are concerned not with visions, but with facts. I should not feel justified in risking my clients' money upon such a vision."

"Then don't. Risk your own! We are organizing the Morris-Judson Automobile Company today. One hundred thousand shares of stock are for sale at par value of one dollar. Take ten thousand—fifty—take all of it, Mr. Gilman, and you will never regret it. I expect to sell one thousand cars next year, with nearly two hundred thousand dollars profit. That's eighty per cent. on our capital in one year. Does that look reasonable?"

"No, it doesn't," declared Stephen Gilman shortly, yet his eyes were alight; there was a certain cupidity in the way in which he licked his long, thin lips. "And yet it does look to have a certain amount of basis, the way you put it."

George fell back as inevitably as ever on what others were doing in their pioneer years. "And probably not a banker in on those creamy profits

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 because they were too conservative to see the opportunity! Business men see it though. Why not your You are banking to make money. Here's something that will make money faster. Here's a chance to get in on the ground floor of a new enterprise with a block of stock as large as you want it."

Gilman's manner was peculiar. His hand had stolen up till it masked the expression of his mouth, and over the screen of the hand the eyes peered out, questioning, deliberating, hungering.

George had finished. He had said his say. Good tactics required that the banker should from this on nibble his own way into the enterprise if he would.

It was now, therefore, that real chaffer began. Stephen Gilman hemmed and hawed; he examined and cross-examined; he analyzed and reanalyzed the constituent elements in and the prospects of the Morris-Judson Automobile Company. To George the moment when the shrewd old banker definitely made up his mind was as clear as if the jaws of a steel trap had clicked. But even then it was some minutes before Mr. Gilman spoke.

"I will take ten thousand shares of your stock, George!" he said decisively, and quite with the air of a man entirely well and physically alert, he lifted his softshod feet, swung them to the floor, and stood erect, a tall, spare drape of gray,

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 and stalked to a richly appointed writing desk in the corner, where he seated himself and drew toward him a sheet of heavy notepaper with embossed crest. Upon this he wrote methodically, with heavy down strokes, a communication addressed to the Morris-Judson Automobile Company, signed it, blotted it, and scanned it approvingly.

The scratching of the pen had etched certain lines of triumph into George's very soul. The blood in his veins was jumping for he understood that this was a subscription of the banker for those ten thousand shares of stock.

But in the very act of passing this signed subscription over to George, Mr. Gilman hesitated, faced his desk again, turned the leaf, and began to write upon the second page also.

The young promoter was on nettles. This writing was being done, he perceived, so as to make the addendum a portion of the stock subscription upon the first page. Gradually the ardent salesman's heart began to sink, his sense of victory to abbreviate itself. The canny financier was attaching some sort of string to his subscription—tying him up in some way.

Once more there was the agony of a patient blotting, a slow, contemplative reading, and a final approval of the document as a whole, and then with a grim smile and an appearance almost of reluctance the banker passed it over.

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 "There," he said, "I feel as if I owe you something anyway. I was rather sharp with you yesterday and this afternoon, and you were very patient. At the same time you didn't kow-tow. I like a man who can stand up under attack but without being offensive."

George flushed under the compliment, greatly relieved by the speech, and tried to restrain himself as he reached for the document. The first page, as he had divined, was a written subscription for the ten thousand shares of stock, but the second page, when, without seeming too disgracefully eager, he could get his eye upon it, was something different, something astonishing. It read:

"I condition my foregoing subscription upon the agreement that each of these friends of mine listed below shall be given an opportunity to acquire a portion of the remaining ninety thousand shares upon the same terms as myself before it is offered to others."

There followed the names of some eight or ten capitalists of the town. Swiftly the significance of what had here been done swept over George. His physical sensation was a sort of chill of delight.

"Mr. Gilman!" he cried, as he wrung the banker's hand, "Mr. Gilman! That means that you've practically sold every dollar of this stock for me. Not a man of them will pass it up."

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 Stephen Gilman smiled at the compliment in the deduction, at the same moment that he was lifting both hands in an endeavor to check the flow of George's stammering gratitude. Although George did not know it this transaction, as it stood, was like the character of Stephen Gilman. When he did a thing at all, he liked to do it handsomely.

"You're going against a good deal of odds," he said almost apologetically, "and I felt like giving youa boost. Anyhow, it's not automobiles I believe in, so much as I believe in you. Keep your head up and you have a remarkable business career before you, George. I predict it. I shall watch your course with interest. Don't disappoint me now, will you?"

The plea was almost fatherly—it was almost as Milton Morris had become accustomed to talk to him.

"I'll try not to, sir," the young man answered earnestly. Then he held up the list to explain a sudden eagerness to be off: "This is a trail so warm I feel I've got to follow it up instantly," he said. "You'll excuse me if I go now?"

"Certainly. Get busy. You're working for me now, as well as for Milton Morris and yourself. Get along with you," chuckled the banker, immensely pleased with himself.

But on his way out, even with the mad excitement of such unexpected success dancing in his

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 veins, the young man remembered to look around for that soft Persian kitten of a girl whose appearance yesterday had supplied such a satisfying materialization of his youthful dream. He felt as if in an enchanted palace. Why, he might meet Fay; or at least see her at a distance. Failing that, he might hear her voice humming happily from some of the rooms, or her light foot padding on the stairs, or he might detect that delicate fragrance on the air which had been associated with her presence yesterday, thus indicating that she had recently passed that way and giving him delicious assurance that he was moving through the same world with her.

But none of these delightful speculations was realized and with all the brilliant prospects flecking their bright banners before him as he drove away, he still found it possible to feel cheated on that account.

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OSH! Gosh Almighty!" exclaimed Milton Morris in delightful amazement when George rushed with his exciting news into the little factory on Franklin Street. "Gosh! . . . You did it, by golly, didn't your. . . Well, darned if I didn't think you would—somehow or other. And to prove that I thought so, look here, George, I've been figuring out how we could allot our parts orders to get out these eleven hundred cars."

He pointed to some memoranda on a page of scratch paper, and began to read off the names of the different manufacturers, "It's mainly the matter of assembly room that bothers me," he finally added. "I was looking at the lot next door and the three behind us. If you think you're going to get money so fast, we could stretch a corrugated roof over those lots and that would give us floor space to throw the eleven hundred cars together in."

But George vetoed this instantly. His success with Stephen Gilman had made him feel

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 like a Napoleon. "Too small to do any permanent building on," he said, "but the ground is all right for temporary service. Tell you what we'll do." His mind was working quickly, and he spoke in the same manner. "Get a short term lease on those lots and by the time your parts deliveries begin to come in I'll pick up a circus tent somewhere. '.' Guess that won't be a bad press story! eh?"

Milton Morris, over the top of his steel-rimmed glasses, gazed at his young associate, wideeyed and thoughtful, as he considered the circus tent idea. "You're so dodgasted young and immature you don't know there is any such thing as fail, do you, son?" he inquired benignly.

Four days later George was able to report to Mr. Gilman that while three of the persons on his list had declined with a superior smile the opportunity to become stockholders in the Morris-Judson Automobile Company, eight others had seized upon it with more or less avidity, one taking as many as twenty thousand shares and one as few as three thousand; but all had been taken. Mr. Gilman nodded his gratification and gave George a pat on the back.

The infant concern had now one hundred

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 thousand dollars of new cash in its treasury. Milton Morris contemplated this delightful state of affairs without any special expression of wonder. He was getting used to miracles now.

"The next thing now is to go out and buy about fifty thousand dollars worth of ink," announced the Secretary-Treasurer complacently.

"Fifty thousand dollars for ink?" murmured Milton Morris dazedly and began to look for the joke.

"Printer's ink!" elaborated George, airily.

"Fifty thousand dollars for advertising?" Milton demanded in shocked tones. The equal of the value of the factory he had spent twenty years in building, good will and all, to be spattered over the country in a few weeks in one wild splash of printer's ink!

George saw the unbelief on the gray, slowthinking face, saw his stubborn unwillingness to consent to any such programme of extravagance, and understood it. He knew he had shocked him too much by the suddenness of his announcement, but George was accustomed to use the shock method in salesmanship. It was like dynamiting solid rock. It made shoveling easier afterward. And now he began to shovel.

"You keep thinking, Mr. Morris," he reminded the older man, "in terms of this little shop. Forget it and open your eyes wider!

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 See that thousand car job, over and above the hundred already sold, that we have to build. You admit that you can build 'em for six hundred dollars. I think we'll do it for five hundred and fifty. We sell them at a thousand, dealers' commission twenty per cent. leaving us eight hundred. Out of that margin of profit we allot this fifty thousand for advertising."

Milton Morris gave a fine imitation of a shudder.

"Remember, Mr. Morris," challenged George, "there are two sides to this enterprise—building and selling cars. It's clear you can build the cars—that's already been figured out. Success thereafter depends not upon you, but upon me—upon my ability to have one thousand purchasers standing ready with the money in their hands as you roll the cars out to 'em. That's what I want the fifty thousand for. That's what I have to have it for. Don't you see?"

"I see the gamble, all right," admitted Mr. Morris. "I see; but it's awful hard on a conservative man like me to just pitch fifty thousand up in the air when—we are going to want so—so much—Say, young fellow! Do you realize that there's got to be something like five hundred thousand dollars for payrolls and materials poured through the cashier's window in order to swing this job?"

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Rh "So you practically"

"Oh, no, Mr. Worters, you mistake me. I have not practically guessed. I have guessed. I could tell you if I chose, but it would be no good, for she has not practically escaped you. She has escaped you absolutely, for ever and ever, as long as there are branches to shade men from the sun."


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 "But not all at once," insisted George, rising and beginning to talk, as was his custom when enthused, with hands, eyes and expression, as well as with his glib tongue. "We don't have to have that money all at once. Time, time, Mr. Morris, is to be the essence of all our contracts. First place, I'm going to ask you to let me take every one of these parts contracts and go out and place 'em myself. Time—time—time is what I'm going to demand. To begin with, nobody is going to dump deliveries on us all at once. I'm going to arrange to have so many engines, so many springs, and so forth, delivered us each week just as we want 'em. No payments for entire contract due at once, you see. Beyond that, in fact, I'm going to make all these parts people consent to a deferred payment system. The bait will be our contracts for next year, which, of course, will be four or five times as big."

"Four or five—" Milton Morris gasped.

"I'm going to push a lot of those payments away off into August and September," George boasted. "I'm going to make it clear that if they want our future business they have got to lend us some of their present-time credits. And believe me, Mr. Morris, I'm going to make them see that our business, widening out over a period of years, is going to be worth stretching a point to get an initial grip on."

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 "I concede you'll do that, George," admitted Mr. Morris. "I concede you'll do that if you start." Inevitably he was yielding to the enthusiasm of the younger man and to his colossal faith in his ability to do what he had planned.

"All right, then. We're agreed on our advertising campaign," said George, and pressed on eagerly, "now the first thing for you to do Mr. Morris, is to go ahead and make an external drawing of an automobile that is a lot better looking than any one else has ever produced for anything like the money. Just make the picture. Then give it to me. I'll sell the picture while you go to work to build a car that justifies the picture."

Milton Morris called in a commercial artist to help him; and a few days later George walked in upon the head of a prominent firm of advertising agents.

"I don't know a darned thing about writing advertisements, but I believe in 'em," he prefaced. "And I know how to sell goods. Now here's the car I'm going to build, and we've made an advertising appropriation of fifty thousand dollars. You take that picture and you create a demand that will absorb one thousand cars like that between March 1st and September 30th, and our advertising account is yours. Send a man out to the factory and Mr. Morris will give him the mechanical points; then send him

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 to me and I'll tell him how I turn those points into arguments when I talk automobile. That's all. The rest is up to you."

"Not so fast, my dear Mr. Judson; not quite so fast," objected the head of Cooper-Braithwaite, a largish man with heavy shoulders, a clear eye, a strong face and rimless nose glasses through which he gazed very keenly, with an expression almost of disapproval; and yet it was difficult to register entire disapproval of such a glowingly well-intentioned young person as now stood before him.

"I will go to your factory myself, with you. Mr. Morris can demonstrate his mechanical points as you suggest; then you go to work to sell the car to me. If you succeed, I'll take your contract, and sell your cars to the reading public of America. If you don't sell it to me—convince me, that is, of its sound value—I won't touch it at all."

George was a little taken back. "Is that the way you fellows work?" he inquired rather breathless.

"It's the way somie of us work," returned the head of Cooper-Braithwaite, with discriminating emphasis.

"Well, it's the right way," decided George instantly.

As the time passed George was able, through his stockholders' influence, to borrow fairly

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 freely from the banks. When the banks eventually drew the strings close—and they did this at a disappointingly low limit to George,—Thomas Pence, President of the Blue Lake Steamship Company and one of the stockholders interested through Stephen Gilman, generously opened his own check book.

"Stop worrying, George!" he told the anxious young man. "I'll lend you what money you need. Or quit this foolish little business soon as you can get away from it. It's good, of course, but it's little. It'll always be little. I'll take you into my steamship company, give you a block of stock, make you general manager in a couple of years, and you can stand to skim off a million before you're gray."

Pence had heard all about how George had worked out the allotment of the parts contracts; and he, in common with some others, was beginning to look upon young Judson as Milton Morris did, as a kind of a miracle-worker.

But George could say "No," to the steamship business. "Mr. Pence," he responded in that earnestly respectful way of his which always robbed disagreement of its offense, "if you think this is a little business you're a blind man. Automobile manufacture will be the biggest business in America in half a century. It'll be pretty good-sized in ten years. A million? Say, the Morris-Judson Company will do a mil-

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 lion dollar business its first year!" Then he laughed at his own audacity, and astute old Thomas Pence laughed also.

"Hope so, George!" he hemmed. "Hope so!" and the way he opened up his check book would indicate that the hope was very firm.

From the time of this talk with "Uncle Tommy" as Pence's intimates called him, George began to ride entirely easy in his mind. He had grown a little tired with the strain of contest. He felt like a football player who had been playing every position on the team at one and the same time. He had smashed through the line, he had gone round the end, he had been tackled and gone down with the whole howling pack of opposing fates on top of him; yet always so far he had wriggled across the line to some kind of victory. And at last it began to look as if things were ripe for him to kick a goal from the field.

The month of May had come. That paltry one hundred cars which he had created so much of a sensation by selling in five weeks of the early autumn were manufactured and delivered two months ahead of time. The circus tent was up. It made George chuckle to see that old main-top thrusting its three centerpoles high in the air with a Morris-Judson pennant flying from each of them. And on the wide temporary floor beneath it the newest model of Milton-Morris was leaping into existence by scores.

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 It was a nifty looking car, really, George admitted that; and the Cooper-Braithwaite advertising campaign had worked out beautifully. Over three hundred orders were on file now, and scores of applications for the Morris-Judson agency were coming in from all over the country, mostly from old bicycle dealers.

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EPTEMBER 30th had come. The assembly floor was empty. The treasury was full. There was not a note in any bank. The last promise was kept—except one. And that was a personal promise of George Judson. The board of directors were gathered in Mr. Morris's office, ready to meet. Outside in the accounting room the Secretary-Treasurer walked to and fro nervously, waiting for the bookkeepers to complete the balance sheet. At length their computations were checked and confirmed to the last decimal, and alert young Percy Mock handed over a sheet with typewritten columns of figures some of which were emphasized by underscores in red.

"Shall I write the dividend checks now, sir?" Percy inquired.

"On the basis I outlined to you," answered George, with an affirmative inflection, and walked toward the inner office, scanning the figures as he went.

About President Morris and the scarred old desk there sat: Aaron Ward, short, thick, bald and fifty; Thomas Pence, balder, bluffer, older,

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 but with a complexion of perennially youthful pink; and S. R. Peattie, ageless, colorless, fleshless, with a hook nose and a sticky kind of eye that appeared to adhere to any person or thing at which he looked. These were three of the friends of Stephen Gilman who had taken advantage of his stipulation and had acquired stock in the Morris-Judson Automobile Company.

"Ahem!—Ah!Reading of the Minutes!" said President Morris, a bit awkwardly, for he was "not much on these legal details," as he was accustomed to confess to his directorate at each meeting.

George read them quickly, probably with not a soul listening but every eye staring at that sheet of paper which, with a sense of dramatic values, had been placed tantalizingly upside down upon the table. S. R. Peattie's sticky eye seemed almost drawing it toward him, as oriental thieves draw money to them by means of wax on the end of a stick.

"Approved!" jerked out Mr. Morris, for he too was anxious to get on, to have that sheet of paper turned over and read.

"Report of the Secretary-Treasurer on year's business, profit and loss," grunted Mr. Morris, and—George turned the paper over.

The respect with which these seasoned business men concentrated their gaze and prepared to listen seemed almost exaggerated, as if they,

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 perceived in this precocious enthusiast an embryonic captain of industry whose genius was about to disclose itself and lead them on to fortune.

"The year's business," George announced, in a voice that tried hard not to sound strained, "shows a total volume of $1,113,492.00; and the profits, after deducting all expenses for operation, payment of interest and other fixed charges and allowing ten per cent. for depreciation on plant, are $214,421.62."

Two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars profit on a capitalization of $250,000.00, not all of which was represented by cash or material! It was unbelievable. For a moment there was silence. They exchanged glances with each other, sidewise or over the tops of glasses, and Uncle Tommy Pence who had believed in George so heartily and financed him so generously, could not repress a chuckle and a sly kick under the table at the sometimes faint-hearted and pessimistic and always covetous Peattie.

George passed the sheet to Aaron Ward, who glanced at it reverently, and passed it to Peattie; Peattie gazed long and stickily and passed it to Uncle Tom who, with scarce a look, handed it on to Milton Morris and drummed impatiently upon the table for the next order.

The sensation was not due to the fact that this total of profits was great. All these men were

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 used to much larger figures; but the percentage of profit—eighty per cent. on their investment—and made on something new and erratic and uncertain, an automobile; that was what stirred them.

"I move you, Mr. President, that a dividend of eighty per cent. be declared upon the capital stock of the Morris-Judson Automobile Company," proposed the Secretary-Treasurer.

"Eighty per cent? George, you're nutty," chided Uncle Tom humorously. "Success has gone to the head. You'll need a big surplus for future operations. Declare a dividend of ten per cent; that'll satisfy everybody; and then go ahead and create a surplus for an operating fund."

"Mr. Pence," said George, rising and indicating by his manner that he was going to make a very important plea, "This is a matter of honor with me, a matter of making good, and making good is just now bigger than any other issue which confronts this youthful and, as I believe, growing company.

"I promised Mr. Gilman, and every other stockholder, yourself included, something like eighty per cent. profit on their investment. Looking back over the year, I shudder to think how hazardous that was, but we happened to make good on it. Now, gentlemen, I want you to authorize me to take to every stockholder to

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 whom I made that promise a check for his dividend on that basis."

George sat down. His plea had been almost personal. He had asked of them nothing but permission to make good on his pledged word, and he had asked it modestly but not without the suggestion of intense emotion. There was an inevitable moment of silence and immobility. Then Milton Morris, rubbing his hands nervously, feeling a bit shy in the presence of these older, richer men who had honored his office with their presence, looked round his board and urged: "George has kind of put this thing over on his own—his own heart, you might say—and I think we ought to let him do about the way he wants to with these profits on the first year. He's probably got some good idea tucked away inthe, tonneau of his brain right now that's better than any we've thought of."

"Hum! Humph!" rumbled Uncle Tommy Pence deep in his lake-fogged throat. "Certainly. We would anyhow. Mr. President, I sO move you."

"Second," said Aaron Ward, who was rather of a seconding nature.

"All in favor?" questioned the presiding officer.

Everybody nodded, even Peattie, and he rather eagerly, as if he could not get his hands on an eighty per cent dividend too soon.

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 "So ordered."

George lifted a beckoning hand. Percy Mock, peering through the glass wall and waiting for just that signal, stepped in and laid a package of pink checks before the Secretary-Treasurer, who instantly took them up and feathered their edges lovingly through his fingers. It was a great moment for young George Judson. In these checks he held the final irrefutable evidence that he was not an idle dreamer of dreams but a real doer of deeds. As if lost in thought, forgetful of an audience, he lovingly caressed those perforated edges once more, gloating a little; and it was impossible that the staid business men whose eyes were upon him so intently did not comprehend something of what was passing in the younger man's mind, and sympathize with it.

But before the silence could become more than just noticeable George had recovered himself and began to pass out the checks; to Milton Morris a check for eighty thousand odd, to himself a check for forty thousand odd—money that was now his, not the company's but his own, earned by his own energy, the product of his own investment of money and labor. He hesitated before it, color coming and going in his cheeks, his eyes arrested and clinging to the check almost as Mr. Peattie's adhesive optic might have clung. It was the concrete evidence

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 of his success. Then he found and passed over the checks of Mr. Pence, Mr. Ward and Mr. Peattie.

Peattie snatched at his, noted the exact amount $12,432.12, and was about to slip it into his wallet when George stopped him.

"One moment, Mr. Peattie. I want you to give that back to me," the Secretary-Treasurer exclaimed astonishingly.

Mr. Peattie's mouth was open, and he glared as if a most astounding thing had been proposed. "Give it back!" he crabbed.

"Yes, Mr. Peattie. I want you to endorse it and hand it back to me. The company is going to borrow it from you. I am going to ask Mr. Pence and Mr. Ward to do the same. Mr. Morris and I have already agreed that this is what we will do with our checks. We need the money right now in tying up materials for the next year's business at the most advantageous figures possible."

"Then, why'nt you create a surplus!" demanded Mr. Peattie, querulously. "What's the big idea in a cleanhull dividend if you're going to take it away from us again?"

"Because, as I told you," responded George, "I am determined to make good absolutely now and always on any promise I make—you can keep the dividend or lend it to us, but I've got to have your faith, for what I have asked of you

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 so far in the way of personal faith, is little to what I'm going to ask. Furthermore, this lets me out on promises to you gentlemen in the future. I promise you nothing more in the way of profits. You can make your own estimates based upon your experience of today."

"But the other stockholders?" inquired the tenacious Peattie, glaring less and growing more thoughtful, while he stretched forth a long bony finger and tapped the six or seven remaining checks.

"I am going to deliver every one of those in person," explained the Secretary-Treasurer, "to those gentlemen to whom I sold the stock with an estimated profit of seventy-five per cent. or better."

"And then take them away from them again?" Peattie inquired sarcastically.

This forced a smile from George, although his mood was still serious. "I expect them to give them back to me with the same enthusiasm and upon the same terms as the rest of you."

"Well, I'll be damned!" exploded Seth R. Peattie, glaring once more round the circle. Then, reaching for a pen, he began to endorse his check. "I suppose you've got notes already drawn up, running to each of us for these amounts, and that you've got a resolution all ready for us to pass authorizing the Secretary-Treasurer and the President to sign the notes,"

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 he remarked ironically amid the general scratching of pens.

"You have anticipated me precisely," confessed George, and this time his smile was complacent.

"Some day," remarked Mr. Peattie acidly, flinging down the check which had been his for a moment; "Some day young fellow, you're going to stub your toe and fall down hard—being so about everything."

George's face portrayed distress and a great humility at this speech. "Really, Mr. Peattie," he protested. "I try not to be about any of these things. I only think out the safe way and then I work hard, and I have mighty good help from Mr. Morris, and mighty good advice on everything from you gentlemen. Just think: from the advertising contract forward: have I ever been headstrong about anything? Haven't we always agreed perfectly about each policy?"

"That's because you're so darn smooth, you talk so round."

"Mr. Peattie!" rebuked George. "I insist you do yourself injustice. You do your co-directors injustice. It is merely that your own ripe judgment commends the reasons which I advance. If ever your judgment doesn't commend them, you will refuse to agree, I'm sure."

The young Secretary-Treasurer had a bearing

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 so magnificently modest and respectful as he got off this speech, that Peattie knew he was estopped—in the eyes of his fellow-directors if not in his own. Besides he admired the young fellow greatly. "Oh, you're a wizard right now," he conceded, in mollified tones. "I hope you don't ever get to be a was-ard is all I can say. Most men do though. Sooner or later, the procession gets too fast for 'em."

"I wonder if it will ever get too fast for me!" pondered George that night as he turned upon his pillow.

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HE year that followed was so full of complications, so full of striving energies, that George hardly lifted his head when the twelve-months' business cleaned up and he knew that they had done a total of two million dollars' worth with profits above three hundred thousand dollars; but immediately began to lay out the program for the year to come and after that for still another. Steadily they were enlarging and enlarging; new machinery was going in, with new plans for enlargement of output. And they made profits too, year by year, larger and larger profits, but year by year they put them nearly all back to make more. The second year they doubled the capital stock and declared a stock dividend of one hundred per cent. Expansion continued to be the order of the day. They made two thousand, and then three thousand, cars in a year.

In 1907 the Morris-Judson Automobile Company was set to produce three thousand five hundred cars. But the panic of that year caught them in midair. Some things of which they had boasted became now their regret—almost their shame.

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 Those factory walls that never stopped rising had eaten up much money. Milton Morris, honest old builder that he was, had been dissatisfied with the turn-out of what he considered was practically an "assembled" car, and wanted to build every part himself to the last screw in a fender.

But this absorbed capital at an enormous rate. It swallowed their surplus, and when the plans for the new year's business were included, it left the concern needing eight hundred thousand dollars at a time when as many hundreds would have been hard to get. The young financier found himself stretched over a barrel. He had to have credit when credit was difficult to get, and two fatalities among his friends made the situation even worse than could be made to appear in any financial statement. Just as he entered the cloud of these business troubles Uncle Tommy Pence, his faithful and generous friend, slipped peacefully out of life. They laid him away when bees were droning in the clover and humming-birds were at the honeysuckle. George mourned him and paid his tribute, but staggered on till one day, when the clouds were darkest, he turned in to the offices of the St. Clair Trust Company, where they told him that Stephen Gilman was down, stricken with pneumonia.

To learn as George did next day that Stephen

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 Gilman was dying—was dead—struck him through as with a poniard of Jove. He was big enough to forget that it withered his financial hopes. He cared only that it killed a man who had been like a father to him.

He sent flowers. He wrote a note of sympathy to Mrs. Gilman in which humbly and earnestly he told her what her husband had meant to him, a struggling young business man who despite one chance meeting was still to her a stranger. By a very early arrival he got himself into a pew at Christ Church near enough to the mourning family to be able to feed his eyes upon Fay, to notice that she was growing slightly taller and with more rounded curves, but that the proud head was bent today and that the shoulders trembled from time to time. His emotions were deeply touched. He longed to crowd out from his pew and go and sit beside her and offer his heart in consolation. So daring are the dreams of love!

At the cemetery he found himself standing nearer and nearer to the mourning circle of the relatives and immediate friends. Once, for an instant, Fay, as if all at once her sorrow had become too intimate to be shared even with her family, turned from the group, her eyes fixed far on distance.

In this moment, strangely, inexplicably, as if he might have floated there, George Judson

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 found himself standing immediately before her.

"I am so—sorry," he stammered. "I loved your father almost as I love my own."

The girl recalled her streaming eyes from distance at first with a start as at a stranger; then recognition came, and with it she gave a glance of grateful appreciation.

"Th—thank you!" she said, with an aspirated sob, and turned from him quickly back to her mother, while George felt himself transported from her vicinity almost as miraculously as he had come to it.

The encounter had done him great good. She had remembered him this time, although she had immediately turned away as though recognizing that he was outside her circle. But to George, indomitable and heart afire, this was no serious damper. He was still outside that circle, but not much longer would he remain outside.

Yet his career was periled now by panic conditions.

But there were two redeeming elements in the situation. One was the changed attitude of the banks toward the automobile industry in the five years since he had made his first appeal to them for a loan.

The other element was the discovery that personal faith in him was now rather widely spread. It was not only isolated individuals like Stephen

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 Gilman who believed in him, but the financial interests generally looked upon him as upon a business institution whose preservation was at least to be considered.

At times of supreme emergency like this, when the business failures were listed in each day's news like the casualties of a battle, a committee representing five important banks and trust companies was appointed to pass upon the condition of the Morris-Judson Automobile Company and determine its right to be assisted as a matter of public policy. When this committee's investigations were complete, George Judson was summoned before it. He went, outwardly calm, but trembling at the knees. Was he nominated for salvation or the scrap-heape Such solemnity argued the latter. The committee sat with grave, non-committal faces. George felt like a victim led out for slaughter. A sense of his helplessness brought a sweat of apprehension to his brow. This committee held the whole achievement of his past in their hands, from the first penny he had saved as a newsboy, to the last profit on the last car manufactured by the Morris-Judson Automobile Company.

A hand—he could not have told whose—motioned him to a chair at the long directors' table, and he sank into it.

"Mr. Judson," the bulbous-browed L. R. Blodgett, chairman of the committee and presi-

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 dent of the Huron National, began—then cleared his throat with a cough as sepulchral as the tone in which he spoke—"I may tell you the result of our conference."

"If you please," said George quietly, but trying to conceal his anxiety.

"Then here it is," blurted Blodgett, as if he pronounced a doom. "This committee regards the success of the Morris-Judson Automobile Company as due to your personal efforts."

This was not a doom; it was a compliment. George wet an eager lip and leaned forward.

"If we, therefore, are to assume its financial responsibilities at this time," postulated Blodgett with a stubborn twist of the chin, "your control must be guaranteed in some way."

"Guaranteed?" George asked, almost resenting. "Why, Mr. Morris and I are the closest of friends. We strike hands before we go ahead on anything. The other directors are unanimous in supporting us."

"That is a very pleasant way to look at the world," broke in Blodgett, "but in our observation as bankers it is the unexpected which must be provided against. I have been delegated to tell you that if you will acquire stock control of the Morris-Judson Automobile Company, we will carry your loans through the year, because we believe your control is a guaranty of their soundness."

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 George leaned forward across the table. His throat was choking with sensations of relief, until his mind began to stagger at the cool cruelty of what seemed an impossible condition. "Acquire stock control," he murmured, dazed, and not thinking very rapidly. "How would I acquire stock control?"

Mr. Blodgett was prepared to be explicit. "Have Mr. Morris and the other stockholders sign an agreement to turn over to you stock enough to make your holdings fifty-one per cent. of the total; in other words, 255,000 shares instead of the 100,000 you now hold."

"But I—I couldn't ask it," protested George. "That would seem disloyal to Mr. Morris, the best friend I have ever had. Besides, how would I ever pay for it? All the money I have been making has been going back into the company, and to buy 155,000 shares at their real value would take three-quarters of a million dollars—more than that!"

"So far as that goes," responded Chairman Blodgett with his merciless willingness to be explicit, "if you do not get your loan, you crash, and the shares are then valueless or practically so."

George felt the futility of further argument on this point. "But where on earth am I going to get the money to pay for that stock?" he urged, bringing up the next question.

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 "Out of profits," declared another member of the committee. "You can pay for this stock and be the owner of it in one year's business."

Such computations seemed dizzy, and yet George saw that they were within reason. He perceived a huge, feelingless machine operating with sure precision to make him rich. He could not stay it—could not fend it off.

"Then there's one other thing," recalled Mr. Tompkins, "The name of the concern must be changed."

"Changed?" George's face was white and adamantine. This was something he would fight to the uttermost.

"Yes," insisted Chairman Blodgett. "You are the person who is known. It is you who have made the business what it is, and won it the standing it now has. The fact of your acquisition of permanent control must be advertised by a change in the name to the Judson-Morris Automobile Company."

George shook his head resolutely. "I'll never consent to that. The thing behind our success is the car we build; the thing behind the car is Milton Morris. Gentlemen," and George raised his voice and stood up as for one of those stump speeches of his, "I'll never consent—it would break Mr. Morris's heart!"

George looked so doleful that Banker Jones had to smile. The other bankers smiled also.

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 The gravity of the meeting seemed to have been broken up, so far as the bankers were concerned, and George decided to wait until he could talk it all over with Milton Morris. There was some informal chat around the table about details of the loan, should no hitch occur, and the method of allocating it among the various financial interests represented. George listened to and participated in this, but not hopefully. He felt that relief was being offered to him at too high a price, and it was with an expression of defeat upon his face that eventually he drove out to the factory and sought for Milton Morris. He was not in his office, and Judson eventually found him wandering round the huge plant, with a face like a graven stone, looking lost and helpless.

"What's the outlook—hey? They won't lend us?"

"They will," said George, surprisingly and rather desperately. "Yes—they will: but upon the most absurd conditions. It seems like treachery to tell it to you."

"Treachery? What do you mean, George?" and the older man's voice was steady and brave if also anxious and puzzled. He looked searchingly into his young associate's face. "I never had a son, but if I did I couldn't trust him more than I trust you. What's the matter with you, boy? Let's go in and talk it out." It was no-

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 ticeable that the older man had the greater amount of poise though his mind was filled with this darkness of uncertainty.

They walked rapidly into the administration wing of the plant, and up the broad staircase to the glass-walled room which held the president's office in these more ambitious days, and to a new quartered-oak desk of mammoth proportions where Milton Morris liked to sit with blueprints and drawings before and about him. Before this oaken plateau both men drew up: chairs.

"They want you and the other stockholders to sell me shares enough to make fifty-one per cent. so I will have majority control, before they'll make the loan," blurted George.

Milton Morris straightened his shoulders. "Is that all?" he laughed. "Shucks, I've stood ready to do that since the first year's business. It's you that's making us all rich, George."

But young Judson looked almost shocked that his associate and senior should consent thus readily to the treason, and even appear to glory in it.

"But they want to change the name around too," he further specified. "They want to make it Judson-Morris."

"They do, eh?" and old Milton frowned a bit grimly, while he considered. "Well, let them! That's fair enough. You're the big man

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 of the concern, George; yours is the big name. Yes; I'm for that. Make you president, hey, and still general manager; and make me vice- and office-boy? That the idea?"

"I suppose so," confessed George sheepishly.

"And if we do that, they'll underwrite our loans?" The old man's face was eager, even excited, as he sought to gain a specific assurance on this point.

"That's what they say."

Milton Morris threw an arm around the absurdly dejected figure beside him. "George!" he husked gratefully. "You've saved us. Saved us! You made this business out of a shoestring, and now you've saved it for all of us."

But the younger man was still in a protesting moodmood. [sic]

"Mr. Morris," he began to postulate, "if ever I get this business to the point where we're out of debt and independent of the whole world, the first thing I'll do is to sell your stock back to you at what I paid for it, and the same for every other stockholder who gives up prospective profits to me."

The older man looked at the younger queerly. "George," he observed, "you're a kind of a nut. Quit chewing your thumb now and set right there and dream next year's business, while I appoint old Milt Morris a committee of one to

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 run round to these stockholders and get 'em to agree to what I'm willing to agree to."

Milton Morris put on his hat and went out. George remained at his desk pondering the turn of the wheel of business fate which, while it saved his company and his associates, would in one year make him its majority owner and a millionaire. A millionaire! A far-off goal of unthinking youthful ambition had suddenly moved near where he could reach out and touch it; and mentally he held back his hand.

There remained details of the loan and the stock transfers to be worked out, but that was swiftly done, and George, now that he was titularly and actually the chief in command, operated with a new sureness and a new sense of stability. Under the impulse of this new confidence, he left his high mark of 3500 cars far behind and built and sold 5000 in the new year. His profit from this operation not only paid for his newly acquired stock, but it left him more than one hundred thousand dollars besides. Neither was George Judson alone in doing things. Milton Morris capped this year of progress by producing a new and startling model which he called the Nemo. In it the acme of perfection in a medium-price car seemed to have been attained. The Nemos became instantly famous. Ten thousand of them were built in the second year after the conversion of Morris

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 Judson into Judson-Morris, and it was plain that they would all be sold. George's dividend that year, if he drew it out, would total more than one million dollars.

He proposed coolly to build the next year twenty thousand cars; and he proposed something else!

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ETROIT society is old and staid. Its traditions run back to the English occupation—even back of that to the French—but they run also forward to the new crop of motor millionaires, and there were always new people breaking in. Among these climbers this season there appeared eventually a smooth, symmetrical young man of twenty-six or seven, whose presence began to be noted quite regularly at dinners, dances, whist parties, and the like—a young person with regular features, a black comb-back, an olive skin that was ruddy in the high lights, a pair of dark but light-filled eyes, and a determined mouth which smiled easily—what romantically-minded women are apt to call a dark, interesting face.

His manners lacked the easy assurance of those to the habit born; yet they lacked it only in confidence of execution. That would come with practice. He seemed instinctively to say the right thing and to do the right thing; and, in a society where young men from sheer arrogance of birth were sometimes apt to be too bold, too impudently sure of themselves, a certain shy-

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 ness—a little lack of assurance—was almost a charm.

George Judson was having his chance at last; and appeared quite well equipped to make the most of it. Since his high school days he had not ceased to keep up the habit of cultural reading—history, essays, science, philosophy, the masterpieces of fiction—and maintained a certain acquaintance with what was being said ia the smarter periodicals. Seldom had a day been so long or so wearing that he did not rest his mind and feed it with some nibblings from a book or worth-while magazine. This enabled him to talk well. He danced acceptably and played a passable hand at bridge. But what commended him to the younger set was that he was a jolly devil and went in for sports. He rode, he golfed, he played tennis, and pulled an oar on the river.

Fay Gilman was fond of equestrian exercise and took it quite regularly at stated hours. "Oh, what a beautiful horse!" she exclaimed one day, as a dappled sorrel with a flash of white in the face went single-footing by. "And what a perfect rider!" Her eyes turned to follow him.

She did not know that this was a moment the rider had lived for calculatingly; that he had combed the Mississippi Valley for the handsomest of the colts of Artist Montrose, a beautiful horse he had seen at a County Fair some-

,

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 where in the west on one of his earliest motor-selling trips; or that he had spent three painful months under instruction, to acquire that seat on an English saddle—all in the hope that he might encounter her like this and that she might make just the remark she had made about horse and rider.

Neither did he know now that she had made it; but was thrilled enough with getting a glimpse of her as he passed—in her riding suit of linen with black boots and a black derby hat from under which her eyes looked bluer, her cheeks rosier, than they had ever looked to him before.

"Why, I do believe that is the young man who was driving father at the time of the accident and who brought him home. I heard that he had made a lot of money. He was such a distressed spectacle that day in the hall."

Fay made this remark to Dean Galt, her riding companion, who loved her with a slow, cold fire and bored her by a humble persistence that was the more irritating to her because she feared she must some day succumb to it.

"Purse-proud and thoroughly disagreeable—always showing off—that up-start type!" criticised Dean, who had been incensed by what he regarded as alienated admiration, and who, incidentally, had inherited his millions. "I can't stand 'em," he concluded virtuously.

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