Two or three weeks after the new sign of “Tracy & Boyce” had been hung upon the outer walls of Thessaly it happened that the senior partner was out of town for the day, and that during his absence the junior partner received an important visit from Mr. Schuyler Tenney. Although this gentleman was not a client, his talk with Horace was so long and interesting that the young lawyer felt justified in denying himself to several callers who were clients.

Mr. Schuyler Tenney, who has a considerable part to play in this story, did not upon first observations reveal any special title to prominence. To the cursory glance, he looked like any other of ten hundred hundreds of young Americans who are engaged in making more money than they need. I speak of him as young because, though there was a thick sprinkling of gray in his closely cut hair, and his age in years must have been above rather than below forty, there was nothing in his face or dress or bearing to indicate that he felt himself to be a day older than his companion. He was a slender man, with a thin, serious face, cold gray eyes, and a trim drab mustache. Under his creaseless overcoat he wore neat gray clothes, of uniform pattern and strictly commercial aspect. He spoke with a quiet abruptness of speech as a rule, and both his rare smiles and his occasional simulations of vivacity were rather obviously artificial. Meeting Mr. Schuyler Tenney for even the first time, and looking him over, you would not, it is true, have been surprised to hear that he had just planted a dubious gold mine on the confiding English capitalists, or made a million dollars out of a three-jointed collar-button, or calmly cut out and carried off a railroad from under the very guns of the Stock Exchange. If his appearance did not suggest great exploits of this kind, it did not deny them once they were hinted by others. But the chance statement that he had privately helped somebody at his own cost without hope of reward would have given you a distinct shock.

At the present moment, Mr. Tenney was publicly known as one of the smartest and most “go-ahead” young business men of Thessaly. Dim rumors were upon the air that he was really something more than this; but as the commercial agencies had long ago given him their feeble “A 1” of superlative rating, and nothing definite was known about his outside investments, these reports only added vaguely to his respectability. He was the visible and actual head of the large wholesale hardware house of “S. Tenney & Co.”

This establishment had before the war borne another name on the big sign over its portals, that of “Sylvanus Boyce.” A year or two after the war closed a new legend—“Boyce & Co.”—was painted in. Thus it remained until the panic of 1873, when it underwent a transformation into “Boyce & Tenney.” And now for some years the name of Boyce had disappeared altogether, and the portly, redfaced, dignified General had dwindled more and more into a position somewhere between the head book-keeper and the shipping-clerks. He was still a member of the firm, however, and it was apparently about this fact that Mr. Tenney had come to talk.

He took a seat beside Horace’s desk, after shaking hands coldly with the young man, and said without ceremony:

“I haven’t had a chance before to see you alone. It wouldn’t do to talk over at the store—your father’s in and out all the while, more out than in, by the way—and Tracy’s been here every day since you joined him.”

“He’s out of town to-day,” remarked Horace.

“So I heard. That’s why I came over. Do you know that your father has overdrawn his income account by nearly eleven thousand dollars, and that the wrong side of his book hasn’t got room for more than another year or so of that sort of thing? In fact, it wouldn’t last that long if I wanted to be sharp with him.”

The words were spoken very calmly, but they took the color as by a flash from Horace’s face. He swung his chair round, and, looking Tenney in the eyes, seemed spell-bound by what he saw there. The gaze was sustained between the two men until it grew to be like the experiment of two school-children who try to stare each other down, and under its strain the young lawyer felt himself putting forth more and more exertion to hold his own.

“I thought I would tell you,” added the hardware merchant, settling himself back in the chair and crossing his thin legs, and seemingly finding it no effort to continue looking his companion out of countenance. “Yes, I thought you ought to know. I suppose he hasn’t said anything to you about it.”

“Not a word,” answered Horace, shifting his glance to the desk before him, and striving with all his might to get his wits under control.

“That’s like him. The last thing he ever wants to talk about is business, least of all his own. They tell a story about a man who used to say, ‘Thank God, that’s settled!’ whenever he got a note renewed. He must have been a relation of the General’s.”

“It’s Sheridan that that’s ascribed to,” said Horace, for the sake of saying something.

“What, ‘Little Phil’? I thought he had more sense.”

There was something in this display of ignorance which gave Horace the courage to face his visitor once more. He turned resolutely toward Tenney.

“Nobody knows better than you do,” he said, finding increased self-control with every word, now that the first excitement was over, “that a great deal of money has been made in that firm of yours. I shall be glad to investigate the conditions under which the business has contrived to make you rich and your partner poor.”

Mr. Tenney seemed disagreeably surprised at this tone. “Don’t talk nonsense,” he said with passing asperity. “Of course you’re welcome. The books are open to you. If a man makes four thousand dollars and spends seven thousand dollars, what on earth has his partner’s affairs to do with it? I live within my income and attend to my business, and he doesn’t do either. That’s the long and short of it.”

The two men talked together on this subject for a considerable time, Horace alternating between expressions of indignation at the fact that his father had become the unedifying tail of a concern of which he once was everything, and more or less ingenious efforts to discover what way out of the difficulty, if any, was offered. Mr. Tenney remained unmoved under both, and at last coolly quitted the topic altogether.

“You ought to do well here,” he said, ignoring a point-blank question about how General Boyce’s remaining interest could be protected. “Thessaly’s going to have a regular boom before long. You’ll see this place a city in another year or two. We’ve got population enough now, for that matter, only it’s spread out so. How did you come to go in with Tracy?”

“Why shouldn’t I? He’s the best man here, and starting alone is the slowest kind of slow work.”

Mr. Tenney smiled a little, and put the tips of his fingers together gently.

“Tracy and I don’t hitch very well, you know,” he said. “I took a downright fancy to him when I first came in from Sidon Hill, but he’s such a curious, touchy sort of fellow. I asked him one day what church he’d recommend me to join; of course I was a stranger, and explained to him that what I wanted was not to make any mistake, but to get into the church where there were the most respectable people who would be of use to me; and what do you think he said? He was huffed about it—actually mad! He said he’d rather have given me a hundred dollars than had me ask him that question; and after that he was cool, and so was I, and we’ve never had much to say to each other since then. Of course, there’s no quarrel, you know. Only it strikes me he’ll be a queer sort of man to get along with. A lawyer with cranks like that—why, you never know what he’ll do next.”

“He’s one of the best fellows alive,” said Horace, with sharp emphasis.

“Why, of course he is,” replied Mr. Tenney. “But that isn’t business. Take the General, for instance; he’s a good fellow, too—in a different kind of way, of course—and see where it’s landed him. The best fellow is No. 1. Look out for him and you are all right. Tracy might be making five or six times as much as he is, if he went the right way to work. He does more business and gets less for it than any other lawyer in town. There’s no sense in that.”

“Upon my word, Mr. Tenney,” said Horace, after a moment’s pause, in which he deliberately framed what he was going to say, “I find it difficult to understand why you thought it worth while to come here at all to-day: it surely wasn’t to talk about Tracy; and the things I want to know about my father you won’t discuss. What do you want, anyway? Wait a moment, let me finish. What I see is this: that you were a private in the regiment my father was colonel of; that he made you a sort of adjutant, or something in the nature of a clerk, and so lifted you out of the ranks; that during the war, when your health failed, he gave you a place in his business here at home, which lifted you out of the farm; that a while later he made you a partner; and that gradually the tables have been completely turned, until you are the colonel and he is the private, you are rich and he is nearly insolvent. That is what the thing sums up to in my mind. What is your view of it? He was good to you. Have you come to tell me that now you are going to be good to him?”

“Good God! Haven’t I been good to him?” said Tenney, with real indignation. “Couldn’t I have frozen him out eighteen months ago instead of taking up his overdrafts at only ten per cent, charge so as to keep him along? There isn’t one man in a hundred who would have done for him what I have.”

“I am glad to hear it,” replied the young man.

“If the proportion was much larger, I am afraid this would be a very unhappy world to live in.”

Mr. Tenney eyed the lawyer doubtfully. He had not clearly grasped the meaning of this remark, but instinct told him that it was hostile.

“All right! You may take it that way, if you like.” He rose as he spoke and began buttoning his overcoat. “Only let me say this: when the smash comes, you can’t say I didn’t warn you. If you won’t listen to me, that’s your lookout.”

“But I haven’t done anything but listen to you for the last two hours,” said Horace, who longed to tell his visitor to go to the devil, and yet was betrayed into signs of anxiety at the prospect of his departure. “If you’ll remember, you haven’t told me anything that I asked for. Heaven knows, I should be only too glad to listen, if you’ve got anything to say.”

Mr. Tenney made a smiling movement with his thin lips and sat down again.

“I thought you would change your tune,” he said, calmly. Horace offered a gesture of dissent, to which the hardware merchant paid no attention. He had measured his man, and decided upon a system of treatment. “What I really wanted,” he continued, “was to look you over and hear you talk, and kind of walk around you and size you up, so to speak. You see I’ve only known you as a youngster—better at spending money than at making it. Now that you’ve started as a lawyer, I thought I’d take stock of you again, don’t you see; and the best way to sound you all around was to talk about your father’s affairs.”

Horace was conscious of a temptation to be angry at this cool statement, but he did not yield to it. “Then it isn’t true—what you have told me?” he asked.

“Well, yes, it is, mostly,” answered Mr. Tenney, again contemplating his joined finger-tips. “But it isn’t of so much importance compared with some other things. There’s bigger game afoot than partnerships in hardware stores.”

Horace gave a little laugh of mingled irritation and curiosity. “What the devil are you driving at, Tenney?” he said, and swung his chair once more to face his visitor.

This time the two men eyed each other more sympathetically, and the tones of the two voices lost something of their previous reserve. Mr. Tenney himself resumed the conversation with an air of direct candor:

“I heard somebody say you rather counted on getting some of the Minster iron-works business.”

“Well, the fact is, I may have said I hoped to, but nothing definite has been settled. The ladies are friends of mine: we came up from New York together last month; but nothing was decided.”

“I see,” said Mr. Tenney, and Horace felt uneasily, as he looked into those sharp gray eyes, that no doubt they did see very clearly. “You were just gassing. I thought as much. There’s no harm in that, only it’s no good to gas with me, for there’s some solid business to be done—something mighty promising for both of us.”

“Of course I’ve no notion what you mean,” said Horace. “But it’s just as well to clear up the ground as we go along. The first experiment of yoking up Boyces and Tenneys together hasn’t turned out so admirably as to warrant me—What shall I say?”

“As to warrant you going in with your eyes shut.” Mr. Tenney supplied the lacking phrase with evident enjoyment. “Not at all, Mr. Boyce. On the contrary, what I want of you is to have your eyes peeled particularly wide open. But, first of all, Tracy mustn’t hear a breath of this whole thing.”

“Then go no further, I beg of you. I sha’n’t touch it.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” said Mr. Tenney, briskly and with confidence. “He has his own private business. Why shouldn’t you? The railroad work, for example: you don’t share in that. That is his own, and quite right, too. But that very fact leaves you free, doesn’t it, to go into speculations on your own account?”

“Speculations—yes, perhaps.”

“No ‘perhaps’ about it; of course it does. At least, you can hear what I have to say without telling him, whether you go into the thing or not; do you promise me that?”

“I don’t think I wish to promise anything,” said Horace, doubtingly.

“All right! If you won’t deal, you won’t; and I must protect myself my own way.” Mr. Tenney did not rise and again begin buttoning his coat, nor was it, indeed, necessary. There had been menace enough in his tone to effect his purpose.

“Very well, then,” answered Horace, in a low voice; “if you insist, I promise.”

“I shall know within half an hour if you do tell him,” said Mr. Tenney, in his most affable manner; “but of course you won’t.”

“Of course I won’t!” snapped Horace, testily.

“All right, then. So far, so good. The first thing, then, is to put the affairs of the Minster women into your hands.”

Horace took his feet off the table, and looked in fixed surprise at his father’s partner. “How—what do you mean?” he stammered at last, realizing, even as he spoke, that there were certain strange depths in Mr. Tenney’s eyes which had been dimly apparent at the outset, and then had been for a long time veiled, and were now once more discernible. “How do you mean?”

“It can be fixed, as easy as rolling off a log. Old Clarke has gone to Florida for his health, and there’s going to be a change made. A word from me can turn the whole thing over to you.”

“A word from you!” Horace spoke with incredulity, but he did not really doubt. There was a revelation of reserve power in the man’s glance that fascinated him.

“That’s what I said. The question is whether I shall speak it or not.”

“To be frank with you”—Horace smiled a little—“I hope very much that you will.”

“I daresay. But have you got the nerve for it?—that’s the point. Can you keep your mouth shut, and your head clear, and will you follow me without kicking or blabbing? That’s what I want to know.”

“And that’s just what I can’t tell you. I’m not going to bind myself to do unknown things.” Horace said this bravely enough, but the shrewd, listening ear understood very well the lurking accent of assent.

“You needn’t bind yourself to anything, except to tell Tracy nothing till I give you the word, and then only what we shall agree upon. Of course, later on he will have to know something about it. But leave that to me. And mind, mum’s the word.” Mr. Tenney rose now, not tentatively, but as one who is really going. Horace sprang to his feet as well, and despite the other’s declaration that he was pressed for time, and had already stayed too long, insisted on detaining him.

“What I don’t understand in all this,” he said, hurriedly—“for that matter the whole thing is a mystery—but what I particularly fail to see is your object in benefiting me. The two things don’t hitch. You tell me that you have got my father in a hole, and then you offer me a great and substantial prize. I don’t catch the sequence. You are not the man to do things for nothing. What you haven’t told me is what there is in this affair for you.”

Mr. Tenney seemed complimented by this tribute to his commercial sense and single-mindedness. “No, I haven’t told you,” he said, buttoning his coat. “That’ll come in due time. All you’ve got to do meanwhile is to keep still, and to take the thing when it comes to you. Let me know at once, and say nothing to any living soul—least of all Tracy—until you’ve talked with me. That oughtn’t to be hard.”

“And suppose I don’t like the conditions?”

“Then you may lump them,” said Schuyler Ten, ney, disclosing his small teeth again in a half-smile, as he made his way out.