Doctor Vardaman was not a wealthy man; he occupied what he considered the golden mean, the "neither poverty nor riches" of the Preacher; enough to live in a simple, uncalculating ease. His chief pastime, as he used to describe it with some amusement, was the practising of certain small economies whereby he accumulated enough to indulge himself once in a while with an expensive new edition, or rare and equally high-priced old one. Like most professional men, he had no turn for affairs, and no temptation ever assailed him to "take a flyer in Phosphate," or anything else. It was, therefore, without any idea of investment that he scaled the stairs leading to Colonel Pallinder's office a few days after the Misses Gwynne had visited Gwynne's to explain their operations in finance. He was, in fact, bent on an errand that took him past the colonel's door, and into the rear of the Turner Building, where the City Superintendent of Parks and Gardens had a retiring, little, unfrequented room. The doctor wanted to file objections against the setting up of several monumental bill-boards and advertising signs on the vacant lots along the west side of Richmond Avenue, facing number 201. "As a physician in good standing, sir," he expounded vigorously, yet not without a smile, to the City Superintendent, who was an old acquaintance and ex-patient. "I dislike to be confronted every time I open my front door with 'Geary's Purple Pills' for various disorders not commonly referred to in polite society. And as a patriotic citizen, I don't want to see our town disfigured by any such monstrosities!"

Coming away with his point half gained, he once more passed Colonel Pallinder's office door. At that time the Turner Building was at the very core of our business district. There was a bank on the ground floor, the old Third National—J. B. had some position in it, assistant bookkeeper, perhaps. One used to catch fleeting glimpses of the young fellow's big shoulders in shirt-sleeves, and sleek, dark head on an altitudinous stool behind gilt wire screens, through the plate-glass windows on the Market Street side. On his last visit he told me that he had gone down Market Street and walked past those old windows in a sentimental mood, recalling the brave days when he was twenty-one. "I got sixty a month," he said, "and thought I was doing first-rate! It's hard to believe that that old rookery was the best office building in town. We hadn't the beginnings of an idea about fire-proof construction; but there was an elevator, and the bank had a floor of black and red tiles, remember? The passages were so dim the gas had to be kept burning at noon-day. The steam-heating apparatus must have been one of the first put in; anyway it never did very well, and was forever breaking down. I've worked in my overcoat many a time, with a blue nose, figuring away with my stiff fingers. Harvey Smith—you know, Jim's brother—had a law-office with some other young chap, I've forgot who, now, on the third floor, and they set up a sheet-iron cannon-stove to keep from freezing to death. There wasn't much business coming Harvey's way in those days—we used to wonder how he made out."

That part of town is now given over to warehouses and junk-shops. The dirty, draughty hallways of the Turner Building are very empty and melancholy. They used to be handsomely carpeted with cocoa-matting, and in the odd corners one came upon little pyramids of tin spittoons piled up handily by the janitor, either just washed or in need of washing. The place was as busy as an anthill that morning when Doctor Vardaman paced along the cocoa-paths on his way out. Near the top of the stairs—which were generally preferred to the elevator—he encountered Colonel Pallinder ushering from his office somebody with a shawl and bonnet and fat black umbrella, whose outlines in the semi-obscurity appeared vaguely familiar to the old gentleman's casual glance.

"Is that you, Doctor? Come in, come in, sir," said the colonel, promptly relinquishing his client ("In point of fact, he dropped her like a hot potato," the doctor said afterwards), when he saw who was approaching. And, overriding the doctor's demurrer, "Oh, nonsense, I say come in, sir! Why, we've got a little business together, forgot that, hey?" He smote Doctor Vardaman a light, humorous, affectionate blow on the shoulder and pushed him into the office. "I don't want to interrupt you——" the doctor began, accepting at last the handsome leather chair his host pulled forward. He glanced about curiously, rolling the colonel's excellent Havana between his fingers. The Pallinders possessed the secret of a delightful spontaneous and whole-souled hospitality; the stranger within their gates was unaffectedly welcome to the best they had—and the best they had was very good indeed; self-denial was a virtue they never needed to practise, apparently. The atmosphere of their house was always kind, gay, care-free, and they themselves highly ornamental. Colonel Pallinder bustled about the doctor with a dozen pleasant little attentions, yet contrived somehow never to be officious. It is a strange thing, and a depressing instance of the inborn tendency to evil of the human race, that it has been within the experience of everyone of us, I think, to lodge with and suffer the kindnesses of many virtuous families to whom the name and the habits of the Pallinders would be anathema—and we shrink from remembering how incredibly we were bored thereby!

The office was a rich, comfortable place. Everything was new; the colonel's mahogany roll-top desk, the leather lounge, which, Doctor Vardaman noted inwardly, had the air of being pretty constantly in use, the brilliantly glazed maps of "Phosphate" territory gleaming on the walls. A great accumulation of mail loaded the desk; the colonel's correspondence was evidently something colossal. There were numberless pamphlets, circulars, prospectuses, and newspaper clippings with rows of figures accompanied by at least half-a-dozen ciphers printed conspicuously at the top. "The ARKANSAS CONSOLIDATED PHOSPHATE, COAL, AND IRON COMPANY, CAPITAL AND SURPLUS $4,455,000.00." "EL PASO & RIO GRANDE EXTENSION is the BEST ZINC STOCK on the market at the price. EL PASO MINES have paid over $172,000,000.00 in dividends. We strongly recommend this STOCK for INVESTMENT. Ballard & Co., Wall St., N. Y. William Pallinder, Agt." Doctor Vardaman surveyed these and like documents with a kind of satirical interest. "Of course," he used to explain, "I had had more than a suspicion for a good while that 'Phosphate' and 'Zinc' and the colonel's capitalist friends were all more or less mythical. You can't be as intimate as I was with a man like that for two years and not 'get a line on him,' as the boys say. And then there was Steven and that terrific flare-up he had with Gwynne about the rent in my own library. Latterly I had begun to have a pretty well-defined notion that Pallinder was in a tight place—getting near the end of his rope in our town, at least. Along in the fall sometime he had borrowed fifty dollars of me on some pretext; and I not unnaturally supposed that he wanted to corner me into lending him another fifty, or maybe thought that with my hazy ideas about business he might make a sale of 'Phosphate.' I was a good deal interested to see how he would go about it; I'd quite made up my mind not to do either, you know—lend him the fifty, or buy any stock, I mean."

What then was the doctor's astonishment when Colonel Pallinder impressively brought out an elegant dark green Russia-leather purse and card-case combined, with "W. B. P." intertwined in a gold monogram on one side, and from a thick layer of greenbacked bills therein selected a fifty-dollar one and laid it on the old gentleman's knee! Doctor Vardaman stared at it as if it had been a specimen from the flora of another planet.

"Now, now, now, no objections! I insist," said the colonel, rather unnecessarily in view of the doctor's dumb surprise. "It's a matter of principle with me, even about such paltry sums as this, that short settlements make long friends," he continued, conveniently oblivious of the fact that he had been in the other's debt for this particular paltry sum more than six months. "Never could understand, sir, how a man can go on owing and owing people simply because he knows they're his friends and won't dun him. That's a queer idea of honesty, seems to me," said the colonel, looking Doctor Vardaman in the eye with a frank and open smile. "You don't come down this way very often, Doctor. I suppose you think all this—" he waved his hand around—"market-place—beasts at Ephesus, hey?"

"I'm a—I'm a little out of place, I fear," the doctor stammered, still in a confusion. "I hope I didn't drive your client away."

Colonel Pallinder threw back his head in hearty amusement. "Oh, Lord, that wasn't a client, Doctor, that old creature—what was her name now, MacGonigal, MacGilligan, MacSomething? No, I was trying to get rid of her as gently as might be without hurting her feelings. For after all people like that have feelings, you know; they are worthy of some consideration; hang it, a gentleman has only one kind of manners. I'm glad she came in while my clerks were all out, and saw me instead of any of them—you know what Jack-in-office is. Why, sir, you have no conception of how we are bothered by that kind of person. They watch the stock market for a while, or get to talking with their friends, and then the first thing you know they come in here all agog with their savings—a hundred, two hundred, perhaps three hundred dollars, wanting to invest! It's the hardest thing in the world to make them understand that we can't handle little dabs like that; they're twice as much trouble as other people's tens of thousands. Your small investor is eternally writing and making inquiries about this stock and that stock, wanting to change, wanting to transfer, wanting to sell, wanting to buy, wanting to be reassured perpetually at the slightest fluctuation of the market. 'Do you think my stock is all right? Will it go any higher? Will it go any lower?' Like as not he sees some perfectly worthless stuff advertised broadcast and promptly sit down and writes me, all on fire: 'William Pallinder, Esq., Dear Sir: Would like your opinion about the enclosed clipping relating to Timbuctoo and South Pole Railway shares. Hadn't I better take my dime's worth of Phosphate Preferred and put it into T. &. S. P.? Yours truly, Jack Ass.' Oh, you may laugh, Doctor, but it's no joke. And then, Doctor Vardaman, there's another side to it that I never lose sight of," said the colonel, leaning forward and tapping the old gentleman on the hand with a grave look. "That, sir, is the question of moral obligation. Take the case of that old woman. 'Why, Mrs. Mac-What's-your-name,' says I, 'if I understand you, this is all the money you have'—it was four hundred and odd, I believe—'and you want to put it into Lone Star common. Now,' says I, 'of course that's a perfectly safe investment, solid as United States bonds, non-taxable, pays nine per cent., and will double in value in the natural course of events before another six months; and what you say is quite true, that you will never have another opportunity of getting it as low as forty-five'—she was really a shrewd and intelligent woman for her class, and for a minute I was almost tempted to let her have her way, for, of course, there wasn't the slightest risk. 'Now,' said I, 'if you had two or three thousand or even one thousand to spare, mind you, I say to spare, I should say to you, go ahead, by all means. But,' says I, 'I can't take the responsibility of letting you invest your last cent this way, just on my say-so. I've got my own money in it, but my money and your money are two very different propositions. Go and consult your lawyer, get the advice of your friends, go to another broker for that matter, if you choose. All I would urge is, do it soon, or you may lose a great chance, such as don't come along every day.' She was very reluctant, but I finally persuaded her; she was just going as you came along. Oh, of course, I know very well, nobody better after all my experience, that she may have gone straight off to some other broker as I suggested, and he'll get the commission, not being so—well, so squeamish as I am, but William Pallinder isn't that—kind, Doctor; we can't help the way we're made, and I'm—not—that—kind!"

He spaced the last words out, emphasising them by a gentle blow with a ruler on the palm of his hand, and leaned back, surveying his companion through a haze of cigar smoke, with the expression of one who might have added, were it necessary: "Behold in me a monument of integrity!"

Doctor Vardaman gazed at the El Paso and Rio Grande circulars with a new respect. Was it possible, he asked himself, that he ought to revise his opinion of Pallinder? To be sure, Huddesley had hinted—but what does a servant's chatter amount to? And then there was that business of the unpaid rent—but Gwynne had not seemed to take that very seriously, and surely he should know. As to that flourishing manner of the colonel's, we are prone to associate it with—well, with buncombe, in plain words; yet it was, in fact, entirely natural, the direct result of certain traditions, early environment, and upbringing. He had reached this point in his reflections, smoking silently, when the colonel was most unfortunately inspired to remark:

"I see you're looking at that map of Phosphate territory in Arkansas. It's a wonderful thing the way the Southwest is opening up, wonderful! All due to Northern enterprise and vigour, sir, every bit of it. We'd be nowhere without you. You'll find few men from my section of the country that will acknowledge it, but it's so. I never did believe in keeping up that spirit of mutual distrust and jealousy—waving the bloody shirt and all that; let bygones be bygones, I say; let's all work together for the common good, and give honour where honour is due. Why, sir, it was a Northern man—Lewis Sheister, from some little town up in New York State, that discovered and worked the first phosphate vein in Arkansas. The people down there in the Ozarks were ready to run him and his men out of there with shotguns when he started in—and now I guess they bless the day Sheister turned up. He's worth five hundred thousand dollars to-day, and he's been a factor in enriching that whole State. Yes, sir, there's millions right here." He rose, and, drawing a pencil from his waistcoat pocket, defined a small circle on the shining brittle surface of the map. "Right in that little zone, sir, millions for anyone, even with a very limited capital—ten for one, sir, ten for one is what dozens of my clients are drawing at this moment," said the colonel, pointing with his pencil, like a teacher of mathematics demonstrating at the blackboard, and eying the doctor profoundly. "Ever think of investing, Doctor?" he added, indifferently, resuming his seat, and picking a thread from his coatsleeve as he spoke.

Alas, the gentleman had protested too much! "You'd find me one of your troublesome small investors, I am afraid," said the doctor, wishing uncomfortably that he could believe in Pallinder. "It's rarely a professional man lays up any money, you know."

"Oh, you'd be a different pair of shoes," said Colonel Pallinder genially. "I'd rather handle a couple of hundred for a man like you than a couple of thousand for some others I could mention. Now I always contend that stocks such as I deal in are a Heaven-sent boon to the man of moderate means. Say you only have a hundred or so. You put it into Ozark Field or—well—yes, you could get half-a-dozen shares of Lone Star. I know a man, a banker in New York, a personal friend, you understand, that I think I could persuade into parting with a little block like that, although they hate to like the devil—but I believe he'd do it for me. Now these things advance so rapidly that in a month or six weeks you could sell out to great advantage—if you didn't want to wait for your dividends, or found the speculation kept you lying awake o' nights," he interpolated, with jovial sarcasm. "Of course, Doctor, I hardly need to tell a man of your intelligence and breadth of view that—um—ah—'there's a tide in the affairs of men,' you know—the time is coming when nobody but the kings of finance will be able to buy and control these shares, they're going up so fast; but if you were already in the ring, as I may say——"

"I doubt if the kings of finance and I would hit it off very well," said the doctor soberly. Colonel Pallinder laughed uproariously. He slapped his knees and laughed, and wiped his eyes and laughed again. Never had the doctor's dry humour received such appreciation; and not being acutely conscious of having been humorous, he observed the colonel's manifestations of delight with a good deal of interest.

"You talk in a rather disparaging vein about the business ability of professional men, Doctor," he said, when his mirth had somewhat subsided. "But the fact is, I've met with just as much shrewdness among them as anywhere else. A successful lawyer, a widely-known and successful physician like yourself—why, he's got to be very much above the average in intellect and education both. A man like you can take hold of anything, no matter whether he's had any previous experience or not—he can take up anything and do well at it. Now, look at you! I suppose you've hardly ever been in a broker's office before in your life, and you come in here, and with scarcely a word of explanation from me, grasp the whole subject at once! I tell you what, I'd like you to meet Sheister, and just hear him talk Phosphate once. He's a self-made man, Doctor, no gentleman-of-the-old-school such as you, but for that very reason I think you'd find it an interesting experience. He'll talk by the hour about his early trials and struggles—it sounds like a romance. He has the whole history of Phosphate at his finger-ends. Of course I can't talk about the stuff except in a business way—I only know that it's been a gold mine for Sheister and the men he got to go in with him. Sir, I knew that fellow when he hadn't but one shirt in the world, and he didn't know where his next meal was to come from—and now he's travelling round in his private car with a valet and a cook! I've done pretty well in Phosphate myself," said the colonel, with becoming restraint; "but I'm not a patch on Sheister. Really, I'd like you to see Mrs. Sheister's diamonds, just for a curiosity. My wife can't bear her—thinks she's common, and all that—you know how women are—but I tell her she's down on Mrs. Sheister just because she's jealous of her diamonds."

"Mrs. Pallinder has no cause to be jealous of anybody's diamonds, I think," said the doctor smoothly. "Our young people will be giving their entertainment in a few days now," he added, thinking it high time to change the subject. And the colonel glided away on the new tack as gracefully as if the manoeuvre had been of his own suggestion.

"Yes, and what do you think that daughter of mine said to me the other day? It seems they have to make a great show of jewelry in the second play—what's the name of it—'Mrs. Tinkleton'? Mazie's 'Mrs. Tinkleton,' and she's going to pile on all her own and her mother's too. So she comes to me: 'Oh, papa, wouldn't it be nice if we could have a real tiara? We've got to fix ma's necklace to look like one, but I think those little coronets they have at Tiffany's are just too utterly sweet.' That's the way the girls and boys talk nowadays, Doctor, 'too utterly too,' 'too intensely all but,'—can't understand half the gibberish they're saying; but I grasped the meaning of that! 'Why, good heavens, my child,' I said, 'do you think I'm made of money? There's your mother's necklace cost me thirty-five hundred—the papers made it five thousand, but you know, Doctor, they always blow around and talk big—not so very long ago, not more than two years, I believe, and now you want a tiara.' 'Well, papa, you know you said ma's necklace was just bought out of that rise in Phosphate, and it was like getting it for nothing, and you'd never miss the money because the dividends were so much more than you had expected. Won't something else take a rise?' And in fact, Doctor," continued Colonel Pallinder, pulling at his goatee with a ruefully comic grin, "she rather had me there. It was just as she said, the stock having gone up beyond my wildest expectations. I realised treble what I'd been looking for, and I always like to make my wife some little gift when anything of that sort happens. But a tiara at Tiffany's! I couldn't quite go that. Must you be going? Well, good-bye. When you feel like looking into Phosphate a little farther, drop in. I've some figures I think would interest you."

Doctor Vardaman took his way from the Turner Building, walking fast in a brown study; such was his preoccupation that twenty steps from the entrance he collided with a young man carrying a green cloth bag, weighted with books or papers, heading for the stairs.

"Hello, Doctor!" he began to apologise. "I didn't know it was you. Why, it's great to see you down here. Come up and take a look at my office."

"I've just been up in the building, Harvey," said the old gentleman, recognising him. "I ought to be home sitting down to my luncheon this minute. Huddesley would discharge me if I were not on time. I went up to see Ogden about those signboards on Richmond Avenue." He paused and then some indefinable feeling prompted him to add: "Fine office Colonel Pallinder has, hasn't he? The building is certainly very complete and well-equipped; you ought to have seen the two-story frame shanty where I first hung out my shingle. It was over a grocery with an outside stairs leading up to it."

Young Smith eyed him with a certain apprehension in his keen boyish face. "Oh, yes, the Turner Building is said to be one of the finest in the West; but I understand they are going to put up some in Chicago that'll beat us all hollow. Pallinder's a great friend of yours, isn't he, Doctor?"

"We are neighbours, you know," said Doctor Vardaman, diplomatically, and smiled, meeting the other's eye. "Don't be uneasy. I haven't been investing."

"Why—I—I——" Harvey stammered, crimsoning in his confusion, yet plainly a little relieved. "I just couldn't help wondering if you had, you know. The Colonel's a great old blatherskite, isn't he? Of course, I don't mean—that is, I mean——"

"Harvey, Harvey," said Doctor Vardaman, wagging his head solemnly, "I'm afraid that's not the way counsel for the defence should open his remarks."

"Well, it's so, you know, anyhow," said the young fellow ingenuously. "Jim sees a lot of them; he goes out there all the time. He's in that shindy they're going to give on the twelfth. Say, have you heard that about Gwynne Peters?"

"No, what was it—Oh, here's my car—never mind, Harvey. I don't need any help."