Mr. Schuyler Tenney had never before been afforded an opportunity of studying a young gentleman of fashion and culture in the intimacy of his private apartments, and he looked about Horace’s room with lively curiosity and interest, when the two conspirators had entered the General’s house, gone up-stairs, and shut doors behind them.

“It looks like a ninety-nine-cent store, for all the world,” was his comment when he had examined the bric-À-brac on the walls and mantels, “hefted” a bronze trifle or two on the table, and taken a comprehensive survey of the furniture and hangings.

“It’s rather bare than otherwise,” said Horace, carelessly. “I got a tolerably decent lot of traps together when I had rooms in Jermyn Street, but I had to let most of them go when I pulled up stakes to come home.”

“German Street? I suppose that is in Germany?”

“No—London.”

“Oh! Sold ’em because you got hard up?”

“Not at all. But this damned tariff of yours—or ours—makes it cost too much to bring decent things over here.”

“Protection to American industry, my boy,” said Mr. Tenney, affably. “We couldn’t get on a fortnight without it. Just think what—”

“Oh, hang it all, man! We didn’t come here to talk tariff!” Horace broke in, with a smile which was half annoyance.

“No, that’s so,” assented Mr. Tenney, settling himself in the low, deep-backed easy-chair, and putting the tips of his lean fingers together. “No, we didn’t, for a fact.” He added, after a moment’s pause: “I guess I’ll have to rig up a room like this myself, when the thing comes off.” He smiled icily to himself at the thought.

“Meanwhile, let us talk about the ‘thing,’ as you call it. Will you have a drink?”

“Never touch it,” said Mr. Tenney, and he looked curiously on while Horace poured out some brandy, and then opened a bottle of soda-water to go with it. He was particularly impressed by the little wire frame-work stand made to hold the round-bottomed bottle, and asked its cost, and wondered if they wouldn’t be a good thing to keep in the store.

“Now to business!” said Horace, dragging out from under a sofa the black tin box which held the Minster papers, and throwing back its cover. “I’ve told you pretty well what there is in here.”

Mr. Tenney took from his pocket-book the tabular statement Horace had made of the Minster property, and smoothed it out over his pointed knee.

“It’s a very pretty table,” he said; “no bookkeeper could have done it better. I know it by heart, but we’ll keep it here in sight while you proceed.”

“There’s nothing for me to proceed with,” said Horace, lolling back in his chair in turn. “I want to hear you! Don’t let us waste time. Broadly, what do you propose?”

“Broadly, what does everybody propose? To get for himself what somebody else has got. That’s human nature. It’s every kind of nature, down to the little chickens just hatched who start to chase the chap with the worm in his mouth before they’ve fairly got their tails out of the shell.”

“You ought to write a book, Schuyler,” said Horace, using this familiar name for the first time: “‘Tenney on Dynamic Sociology’! But I interrupted your application. What particular worm have you got in your bill’s eye?”

“We are all worms, so the Bible says. I suppose even those scrumptious ladies there come under that head, like we ordinary mortals.” Mr. Tenney pointed his agreeable metaphor by touching the paper on his knee with his joined finger-tips, and showed his small, sharpened teeth in a momentary smile.

“I follow you,” said Horace, tentatively. “Go on!”

“That’s a heap of money that you’ve ciphered out there, on that paper.”

“Yes. True, it isn’t ours, and we’ve got nothing to do with it. But that’s a detail. Go on!”

“A good deal of it can be ours, if you’ve got the pluck to go in with me.”

Horace frowned. “Upon my word, Tenney,” he said, impatiently, “what do you mean?”

“Jest what I said,” was the sententious and collected response.

The younger man laughed with an uneasy assumption of scorn. “Is it a burglary you do me the honor to propose, or only common or garden robbery? Ought we to manage a little murder in the thing, or what do you say to arson? Upon my word, man, I believe that you don’t realize that what you’ve said is an insult!”

“No, I don’t. You’re right there,” said the hardware merchant, in no wise ruffled. “But I do realize that you come pretty near being the dod-blamedest fool in Dearborn County.”

“Much obliged for the qualification, I’m sure,” retorted Horace, who felt the mists of his half-simulated, half-instinctive anger fading away before the steady breath of the other man’s purpose. “But I interrupt you. Pray go on.”

“There ain’t no question of dishonesty about the thing, not the slightest. I ain’t that kind of a man!” Horace permitted himself a shadowy smile, emphasized by a subdued little sniff, which Tenney caught and was pleased to appear to resent, “Thessaly knows me!” he said, with an air of pride. “They ain’t a living man—nor a dead one nuther—can put his finger on me. I’ve lived aboveboard, sir, and owe no man a red cent, and I defy anybody to so much as whisper a word about my character.”

“‘Tenney on Faith Justified by Works,’” commented Horace, softly, smiling as much as he dared, but in a less aggressive manner.

“Works—yes!” said the hardware merchant, “the Minster iron-works, in particular.” He seemed pleased with his little joke, and paused to dwell upon it in his mind for an instant. Then he went on, sitting upright in his chair now, and displaying a new earnestness:

“Dishonesty is wrong, and it is foolish. It gets a man disgraced, and it gets him in jail. But commercial acumen is another thing. A smart man can get money in a good many ways without giving anybody a chance to call him dishonest. I have thought out several plans—some of them strong at one point, others at another, but all pretty middlin’ good—how to feather our own nests out of this thing.”

“Well?” said Horace, interrogatively.

Mr. Tenney did not smile any more, and he had done with digressions. “First of all,” he said, with his intent gray eyes fixed on the young man’s face, “what guarantee have I that you won’t give me away?”

“What guarantee can I give you?” replied Horace, also sitting up.

“Perhaps you are right,” said Tenney, thinking in his own swift-working mind that it would be easy enough to take care of this poor creature later on. “Well, then, you’ve been appointed Mrs. Minster’s lawyer in the interest of the Thessaly Manufacturing Company—this company here marked ‘D,’ in which the family has one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.”

“I gathered as much. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me what it is all about.”

“I’m as transparent as plate-glass when I think a man is acting square with me,” said the hardware merchant. “This is how it is. Wendover and me got hold of a little rolling-mill and nail-works at Cadmus, down on the Southern Tier, a few years ago. Some silly people had put up the money for it, and there was a sort of half-crazy inventor fellow running it. They were making ducks and drakes of the whole thing, and I saw a chance of getting into the concern—I used to buy a good deal of hardware from them, and knew how they stood—and I spoke to Wendover, and so we went in.”

“That means that the other people were put out, I suppose,” commented Horace.

“Well, no; but they kind o’ faded away like. I wouldn’t exactly say they were put out, but after a while they didn’t seem to be able to stay in. But never mind them. Well, Cadmus was a bad location. The iron fields around there had pretty well petered out, and we were way off the main line of transportation. Business was fair enough; we made a straight ten per cent, year in and year out, because the thing was managed carefully; but that was in spite of a lot of drawbacks. So I got a scheme in my head to move the whole concern up here to Thessaly, and hitch it up with the Minster iron-works. We could save one dollar a ton, or forty-five thousand dollars in all, in the mere matter of freight alone, if we could use up their entire output. I may tell you, I didn’t appear in the business at all. I daresay Mrs. Minster don’t know to this day that I’m a kind of partner of hers. It happened that Wendover used to know her when she was a girl—they both come from down the Hudson somewhere—and so he worked the thing with her, and we moved over from Cadmus, hook, line, bob, and sinker, and we’re the Thessaly Manufacturing Company. Do you see?”

“So far, yes. She and her daughters have one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars cash in it. What is the rest of the company like?”

“It’s stocked at four hundred thousand dollars. We put in all our plant and machinery and business and good-will and so on at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and then we furnished seventy-five thousand dollars cash. So we hold two hundred and twenty-five shares to their one hundred and seventy-five.”

“Who are the ‘we’?”

“Well, Pete Wendover and me are about the only people you’re liable to meet around the premises, I guess. There are some other names on the books, but they don’t amount to much. We can wipe them off whenever we like.”

“I notice that this company has paid no dividends since it was formed.”

“That’s because of the expense of building. And we ain’t got what you may call fairly to work yet. But it’s all right. There is big money in it.”

“I daresay,” observed Horace. “But, if you will excuse the remark, I seem to have missed that part of your statement which referred to my making something out of the company.”

The hardware merchant allowed his cold eyes to twinkle for an instant. “You’ll be taken care of,” he said, confidentially. “Don’t fret your gizzard about that!”

Horace smiled. It seemed to be easier to get on with Tenney than he had thought. “But what am I to do; that is, if I decide to do anything?” he asked. “I confess I don’t see your scheme.”

“Why, that’s curious,” said the other, with an air of candor. “And you lawyers have the name of being so ’cute, too!”

“I don’t suppose we see through a stone wall much farther than other people. Our chief advantage is in being able to recognize that it is a wall. And this one of yours seems to be as thick and opaque as most, I’m bound to say.”

“We don’t want you to do anything, just now,” Mr. Tenney explained. “Things may turn up in which you can be of assistance, and then we want to count on you, that’s all.”

This was a far less lucid explanation than Horace had looked for. Tenney had been so anxious for a confidential talk, and had hinted of such dazzling secrets, that this was a distinct disappointment.

“What did you mean by saying that I had the whole game in my hands?” he demanded, not dissembling his annoyance. “Thus far, you haven’t even dealt me any cards!”

Mr. Tenney lay back in his chair again, and surveyed Horace over his finger-tips. “There is to be a game, young man, and you’ve been put in a position to play in it when the time comes. But I should be a particularly simple kind of goose to tell you about it beforehand; now, wouldn’t I?”

Thus candidly appealed to, Horace could not but admit that his companion’s caution was defensible.

“Please yourself,” he said. “I daresay you’re right enough. I’ve got the position, as you say. Perhaps it is through you that it came to me; I’ll concede that, for argument’s sake. You are not a man who expects people to act from gratitude alone. Therefore you don’t count upon my doing things for you in this position, even though you put me there, unless you first convince me that they will also benefit me. That is clear enough, isn’t it? Very well; thus the matter stands. When the occasion arises that you need me, you can tell me what it is, and what I am to get out of it, and then we’ll talk business.”

Mr. Tenney had not lifted his eyes for a moment from his companion’s face. Had his own countenance been one on which inner feelings were easily reflected, it would just now have worn an expression of amused contempt.

“Well, this much I might as well tell you straight off,” he said. “A part of my notion, if everything goes smoothly, is to have Mrs. Minster put you into the Thessaly Manufacturing Company as her representative and to pay you five thousand dollars a year for it, which might be fixed so as to stand separate from the other work you do for her. Wendover can arrange that with her. And then I am counting now on declaring myself up at the Minster works, and putting in my time up there; so that your father will be needed again in the store, and it might be so that I could double his salary, and let him have back say a half interest in the business, and put him on his feet. I say these things might be done. I don’t say I’ve settled on them, mind!”

“And you still think it best to keep me in the dark; not to tell me what it is I’m to do?” Horace leant forward, and asked this question eagerly.

“No-o—I’ll tell you this much. Your business will be to say ditto to whatever me and Wendover say.”

A full minute’s pause ensued, during which Mr. Tenney gravely watched Horace sip what remained of his drink.

“Well, what shall it be? Do you go in with us?” he asked, at last.

“I’d better think it over,” said Horace. “Give me, say, till Monday—that’s five days. And of course, if I do say yes, it will be understood that I am not to be bound to do anything of a shady character.”

“Certainly; but you needn’t worry about that,” answered Tenney. “Everything will be as straight as a die. There will be nothing but a simple business transaction.”

“What did you mean by saying that we should take some of the Minster money away? That had a queer sound.”

“All business consists in getting other people’s money,” said the hardware merchant, sententiously. “Where do you suppose Steve Minster got his millions? Did you think he minted them? Didn’t every dollar pass through some other fellow’s pocket before it reached his? The only difference was that when it got into his pocket it stuck there. Everybody is looking out to get rich; and when a man succeeds, it only means that somebody else has got poor. That’s plain common-sense!”

The conversation practically ended here. Mr. Tenney devoted some quarter of an hour to going severally over all the papers in the Minster box, but glancing through only those few which referred to the Thessaly Manufacturing Company. The proceeding seemed to Horace to be irregular, but he could not well refuse, and Tenney was not interrupted. When he had finished his task he shook hands with Horace with a novel cordiality, and it was not difficult to guess that the result of his search had pleased him.

“You are sure those are all the papers Clarke left to be turned over?” he asked. Upon being assured in the affirmative his eyes emitted a glance which was like a flash of light, and his lip lifted in a smile of obvious elation.

“There’s a fortune for both of us,” he said, jubilantly, as he unlocked the door, and shook hands again.

When he had gone, Horace poured out another drink and sat down to meditate.