Scribner's/'Little Millions'

by Francis Lynde

"LITTLE MILLIONS"

 

By Francis Lynde

 

"NO, Mr. General-Manager Dickie Brice, I'm not your man. You'll have to shake the hat one more time and draw another number."

Mr. Gebhart Upham, late assistant engineer in charge of rockmen on the Elk Pass Tunnel, was pacing back and forth behind the new general manager's desk, clothed and in his right mind—for the first time in something over a twelvemonth, as he had just been telling Brice.

"It doesn't appeal to you?" said the general manager.

"Not a bit," denied the honorably discharged borer of tunnels, fishing in the pocket of his English-cut coat for his cigar-case, which he presently extended across the desk top. "Try one of these 'Superbas'; it will do your heart good, after smoking sage-brush and wire-grass."

But Brice shook his head. "No; I can't afford to acquire a taste for your imported extravagances. Cost you twenty-five dollars a hundred, don't they?"

"Worse than that," laughed Upham. "But what's the odds, as long as you're happy?"

"You're money-spoiled, Gebby."

"That's it; that's just what I've been trying to tell you. Good Lord, Dick, I don't have to work for wages! A year ago you sniped me when I was planning nothing more strenuous than a month's shooting in the Escalante Hills, and bullied me into helping you dig that infernal tunnel of yours. I stuck it out, because I wouldn't turn you down after you had turned me up. But now——"

"Well, go on," said Brice, lighting one of his own cigars.

"Now you've got your road built; got it erected, by some Wall Street juggle that I don't understand and don't want to understand, into an independent sovereignty; got yourself elected general manager, with this hole-in-the-desert for your headquarters—and you want me to settle down and become a member of your official family. No, thank you; not if I know it. I'm going back to God's country to help the senior Upham spend some of his accrued interest. It's 'oppressin 'im, crool,' as M'Grath would say."

Brice had pushed his chair back from the desk and was smoking luxuriously.

"Same old dust-thrower, aren't you, Gebby? Takes me back to the tech. school days, when the chancellor was always wanting to know 'why.' As a matter of fact, you're afraid of the job."

Upham was standing in the bay-window, looking down upon the driving activities of the Castle Cliff yard a-building. He spun on his heel at the challenge like a duellist at the signal to fire.

"Think so?" he snapped. "What gave you that notion?"

"The dust-throwing, and other things. But it isn't a notion; it's a settled conviction. You got along well enough up at the tunnel, with only a lot of dagoes to hustle, and with M'Grath to do the hustling. But to be the superintendent of a considerable railroad—well, you'd have to meet and handle men, American men, who will measure you up for what is inside of your skin, and altogether without regard to your father's millions—indeed, the millions will be against you. And you are afraid you won't measure."

Upham was a small man with abnormally broad shoulders, and he brought his fist down upon the desk top with a bang that made the little Zuni-pottery god spill the matches from his hollow head.

"By heavens, Dick, if I could think for a moment that you really mean that——"

"You may think it," said Brice imperturbably. "It's a tolerably broad truth, but you know you can't deny it, Gebby."

"Suffering sea-cooks! Have I got to spend another year in this God-forsaken wilderness to nail that lie up by the ears?"

"It looks that way," rejoined the new general manager coolly. "Your office is at the other end of the corridor. You may have little Cranston for chief clerk and Dickson for a telegraph operator. If you need any coaching——"

Upham dropped into a chair and laughed.

"What I need most is a hired assassin to put you out of the game, Dick. What have you got against me?"

"A longish list of grievances—on the part of my fellow-countrymen. You are a product of the time abhorred of the working world—a rich man's son, with neither the necessity nor the desire to carry your share of the workaday burdens. You've got to make good, here and now."

Upham leaned forward in his chair.

"Tell me one thing, and I'll forgive you the rest: are you digging this stuff out of your own mentality? Or did Kate Hazleton prime you?"

It was Brice's turn to laugh.

"I know Miss Hazleton only as Miss Vanderpoel's cousin. Does she agree with me?"

"As if you had put it up between you. She is daffy on the 'utility' business. That is one thing that made me stick at the tunnel-digging. I never had such letters from her as those I've been getting on top of the range."

"Good—most excellent good! There is also a post-office in Castle Cliff. When can you take hold?"

Upham was walking the floor again.

"I can do it, Richard—for all you seem to be so cocksure I sha'n't measure up to it. But you've got a tough lot of bullies in the train service here; I've ridden the line enough to know that. Do you back me unconditionally?"

"Of course; that says itself."

"All right; get out your circular, and I'll take hold," was the reluctant rejoinder; and when Rader came at the touch of the general manager's call-bell, the new superintendent went to take possession of his offices at the far end of the corridor.

There was a good-natured horse-laugh to go cachinnating over the entire length of the Dolomite and Utah Pacific Short Line when the circular appointing Mr. Gebhart Upham superintendent came out of the train mail.

Upham was known to be Brice's man; and Brice was respected by all who had been with him during the fierce construction battle. But now the rank and file asserted that Brice had blundered. All the world, even to the desert edges of it, knew the fame of the Upham copper millions; and that a son of these millions should make an acceptable master of men was food for mirth.

"Yez moind what I'm sayin' now," was Section-Foreman Danny Hoolihay's dictum. "'Tis Misther Brice'll be the big boss an' the little wan, too; an' Little Millions, wid the goold eye-glasses an' the curled mustache 'll be smokin' his good seegyars wid his purty little feet in th' office windy."

Whether Hoolihay originated the nickname or whether in the eternal fitness of things it sprang spontaneously into being on all lips may never be known. But it came, it fitted, and it remained. Moreover, Hoolihay voiced, in no uncertain sense, the opinion of the rank and file. It had happened before that some favored son of fortune had been carried as a figure-head on the pay-rolls of a long-suffering railroad, and it was merely happening again. So long as "Little Millions" was content to remain a figure-head——

But very early in the game the new superintendent began to show most unwelcome signs of animation. On his first trip over the mountain division he found the rear flagman of a stalled freight lounging a short hundred yards in the wake of his train, instead of the prescribed three hundred. The following morning the flagman and his conductor got a ten-day vacation without pay.

A little later, Bart Bloodgood, pulling the "Flyer" from the West, being five minutes late, scorched over the branch switches at the mile limit in the Castle Cliff yard, and saved his train from a collision with a yard engine by a scant ten feet. He was haled up to the superintendent's office before he could get out of his overclothes and took his place "on the carpet" before a mild-mannered, square-shouldered little man who was peacefully manicuring his fingernails.

"Made a yard stop coming in just now, didn't you, Mr. Bloodgood?" said Upham quietly and without looking up.

Bloodgood did not deny it, but he was willing to shift the responsibility.

"The '15 was in the way," he growled, surlily. "I reckon you didn't want me to split her in two."

"Oh, no," said Upham, pleasantly. And then: "How much room was there between your engine and the 1015 when you stopped?"

Bloodgood wanted to lie, but he did not dare to. "I dunno; maybe ten feet 'r so."

"All right; you may take a day for a foot—ten days. Time-card Rule Seven says, 'Not to exceed fifteen miles an hour over junction switches.' You were bettering that speed by at least another fifteen. Good-morning."

Bloodgood went out, bursting with bottled wrath. It was not the penalty; it was the manner of its applying. If "Little Millions" had cursed him out—had sworn at him and given him a chance to swear back—but he had not; and the mild manner and the air of serene superiority had been as needles to prick the bubble of Western independence. Bloodgood went forth to talk, and his speech, or the virus of it, presently became epidemic.

Thereupon began one of the unsung wars which, from time immemorial, have raged hotly in the peaceful field of the great industries; the bloodless but no less effective war of the rank and file upon its unfellowshipped commanding officer.

There was no planned conspiracy to break Upham; no organized insubordination on the part of the various trade brotherhoods; no disrespect offered when the official car went over the road and it was known that its occupant was looking for flaws in the service mechanism. None the less, Upham was made to know in a thousand ways that he had been tried and found wanting; that his department was gradually disintegrating under his hand; that esprit du corps, which is the fine thread in the otherwise purely utilitarian fabric of the railway service, was fraying to the vanishing-point, and the great loom, with its swift-shuttling trains, was weaving as it could without it.

That was but fecklessly, and with many broken threads. After the first few suspensions and a sharp weeding out of the openly mutinous there were fewer infractions of the Book of Rules. But things happened, and continued to happen, apparently without human aid or connivance, and Upham was in despair.

Once it was the breaking in two of a train of ore "empties" trailing up the steep grade of the Dolomite branch, an accident resulting in a six-hour block of the main line at the junction switch where the runaway section hurled itself out of the canyon. Again it was the snapping of a rail under the engine of the night express; a mischance which would have figured as a terrible disaster if the 1260 had been steaming well enough to make her schedule time at the moment—as she was not. Yet again it was a box-car wind-blown from the blind siding to the main track at Arreta, and the narrowest possible escape for the east-bound "Flyer," which picked up the derelict just as it was gaining momentum for the race down the Arreta grade.

These were accidents unpreventable—on the face of them, at least—and they happened only at intervals. But for the daily bread of disorder there were engines which would not steam, schedules which could not, or would not, be made, trains late, freight delayed, and a steady stream of complaints from the two branches of the traffic department protesting vigorously against the growing unreliability of the train service.

"We are simply out of the fight, Mr. Upham," declared Reddick, the general passenger agent, in one of the interviews which had come to be a part of his regular duty. "We can't hope to secure business against the through lines of the Transcontinental unless we can make our connections at terminals. Number Four missed everything at Denver again last night, and Number One was an hour late at Rachab Junction. Can't we get a move?"

Upham was desperate that morning, and he said, "We can try one more expedient, Mr. Reddick, and we'll try it now." And he rose and closed his desk with a slam, meaning to go to Brice with his official head in his hand.

But when he laid hold of the door-knob it was turned nervously from the other side, and Arthur, the general freight agent, came in.

"One moment, Mr. Upham," he protested, marking the outgoing purpose in Upham's eye. "We are in trouble again at the Malachite. The mine manager writes me he has been trying ineffectually for a week to get enough ore-empties to keep his force busy; and now the Transcontinental is offering to build a spur track over to the mine. Must we go out of business at purely local points for the lack of a little enterprise on the part of our operating employees?"

"No," said Upham shortly; and he changed his mind about going to see the general manager.

Instead, he took to riding the line, day and night; not in his private car, the movements of which must be heralded by wire orders, but on passenger trains, in cabooses, on the engines.

Some few windows, closed hitherto, were opened by these silent tours of observation. It was not an organized revolt, as he had begun to fear. It was merely a vote of a lack of confidence in the executive, less vindictive, perhaps, but not less fatal to the company's interests, than open rebellion. Laissez faire had become the watchword of the service; and the self-beheading operation contemplated by Upham on the morning of resolves seemed to be the only remedy.

This was his summing up of the matter in a heart-to-heart talk with Brice at the close of the tour of tours.

"If there were anything at stake more than your loyalty to a friend—even my own bread and butter—I might be tempted to stay on and worry it out, Dick," was his conclusion of the vexed question. "But there isn't; and there is every reason why you should not imperil your own reputation as a business man and manager for a fool notion that it is your mission to make a working man of me."

"But there is something else at stake, Gebby. You are acknowledging defeat."

"Well, what of it? Sha'n't I have to found libraries or hospitals, or something of the sort, to get rid of the copper millions in the end? But no; I won't say that. It is a facer: to think that I'm not big enough to win the approval of a lot of stubborn, stiff-necked asses who take that way of showing their contempt for my father's money!"

Brice's smile was rather grim.

"Have you been calling them asses?" he inquired mildly.

"Lord help me—no! I don't dare to say anything less than 'Mister' all the way down the line to the section bosses!"

"Ah," said Brice. And then: "Did it never occur to you that that is only another way of calling them asses?"

"Nonsense!" quoth Upham, squaring himself aggressively in his chair.

"It's of consequence only as indicating an attitude," Brice went on. "If I were a section boss, and you didn't swear kindly and companionably at me once in a while——"

"Oh," snorted the defeated one. "if you mean that I should get down and hobnob with 'em."

"No, not that, exactly. But there is a golden mean. You say, by the very swing of your shoulders, Gebby, that you are Sevres and they are this"—tapping the little Zuni-pottery god match-safe.

"Oh, damn," said Upham, quite without heat. And he thrust his hands into his pockets.

"Of course, if you don't care," Brice began again.

"But I do care, now; I didn't at first. It grinds me to the bone to confess that this thing is too big for me."

"It isn't. But the men are thinking, not without cause, perhaps, that you consider yourself too big for it."

"Well, it's too late to turn over a new leaf now," said Upham definitively.

"Is it? Have you written Miss Hazleton that you are about to sit down in the lap of luxury again?"

The failure got up and strolled to the window.

"There it is again," he said over his shoulder. "Kate's coming out here next month—with the President Calliday party on the inspection trip. I'll cut a lovely figure, won't I? Permanent way running down, service all gone to smash, and the devil to pay generally. Mr. Calliday will fire me out of hand; and you'll be lucky if he doesn't fire you."

"Well?"

"It isn't well; it's——"

As we have seen, the bay-window looked out upon the busy yard. At the break Upham struggled desperately with the sash, shot it up, and yelled fiercely down into the clamor of shrilling wheels. The shifting-engine was shoving up a string of boxes, with no one to pilot the blind end. A refrigerator car stood on the adjacent siding, half its length below the "clear post." At the yelling instant came the crash of a cornerwise collision which crushed the ice tanks of the refrigerator and tore out the end of the leading box.

Upham did not wait to find the stairway. Catlike he climbed through the open window to spring from the roof of the platform porch to the top of the smashed box-car; and there were no courtesy titles in the torrent of expletives which he poured out upon the up-running yard crew.

Brice went to the window, looked down, and closed the sash with a smile. "That's a little more like it," he mused. "There's hope for him, yet."

And the yardmaster's comment, worded in the shelter of the switch shanty at the noon pause, was even more encouraging.

"Dommed if 'Little Millions' can't crow like a man whin he's put to 't, b'ys. 'Tis a grea-at thing to have a collige edyoucashun an' be able to swear like Father Flaherty makin' the binediction. 'Tis a gift, me son; and wan that the little boss has been sore neglectin', I'm thinkin'."

That night there was a beautiful freight wreck in the canyon of the upper Boiling Water; and Upham, who had left orders with an astonished Cranston directing that he be called hereafter in all cases of emergency, made one in the crowded caboose of the wrecking train.

At first the men were inclined to let him ride in solitary state, so far as the narrow limits of the car would permit; indeed, a goodly number of them crowded into the tool-car and sat or sprawled on the tool-boxes and coils of hawsers. But for once in a way the superintendent refused to be ignored. Out of Halsey, the conductor, he got the wire story of the wreck, and in the hearing begged a filling of cut plug for his pipe from Simmons, the derrick-man. After that the crew tolerated him, suspiciously, since human nature, in the rough or otherwise, is wary of sudden conversions.

Nevertheless, before the dawn breaking of the toilful night Upham had gained something. Hitherto he had figured in wrecking mêlées merely as a silent and presumably contemptuous onlooker. But this night he displaced Grimmer, the master mechanic, and gave the crew an exhibition lesson in scientific track-clearing. Never in the short history of the D. & U.P.—short in months, but long in disasters—had the wrecking gang known what it meant to have a skilled engineer in command.

Smashed boxes rose out of the ditch at the end of the derrick-fall, righted themselves in mid-air, and were swung deftly into the long line of "cripples" on the temporary siding. Loose wreckage, which would have been fished up by Grimmer a piece at a time, was gathered in ton masses by the grab-hooks and landed successfully on the waiting flats of the work train. And when it came to the overturned engine, it was "Little Millions" himself who waded into the stream where she weltered and made the critical hitches with his own hands—though by this time there were volunteers who would have gone into worse places at his nod.

This was the beginning, to be taken for what it was worth. Round-house, freight-yard, back-shop comment gave it a hearing, and waited for more. Bloodgood, who was posing as a boss-hater from principle, scoffed openly; but Jurgins, the round-house hostler, counselled charity. "He ain't to blame for thinkn' his daddy's money makes a little tin gawd out o' him," was the form the charitable plea took. "Mebbe there's a man inside o' them store-clothes o' his'n, yet—there's a mighty fine wreck artist, anyhow; and don't you forgit it!"

It was Bostwick, engineer of the 1016, ore-puller, who brought the next word of hope. Bostwick was a careful man, and a hot-tempered, and hitherto he had kept out of the way of laissez faire and the untoward happenings. But one night on the run down from Dolomite he had allowed himself to wink once when he should have winked twice, and an open switch had caught him.

"Of course, 'Little Millions' sent for me before I could get off'm the relief engine," was his report of it to the round-house contingent, "and I went up, lookin' for the same kind o' cold hell he's been givin' the other boys—'Um-hm, Mister Bostwick; been getting into the ditch, have you? Thirty days. Good morning.' But say, that little eejit was just jumpin', hollerin' mad when I went in! Blamed if I didn't think he was goin' to hit me! Minded me of old times on the C. & G.R., when you could find your way 'round in the dark by the light of old man Targreaves's cussin'."

The grin went abroad, and Hollingsworth, who was one of the listeners, said, "Reckon you needed it, Mac, didn't ye?"

"Sure! It was on me right enough. When he ran out o' breath I was gapin' like a chicken with the pip, an' he let out again, 'Why don't you talk back, you——.' Say, boys, it's worth a month's pay to hear that little cuss string out the pet names when he's right good and hot—it is, for a fact! I got action after a while, too, and when we both got tuned up you could 'a' heard the fireworks plum across to the Cliffs Hotel. Then we come down to business.

"'This thing won't do, Mac'—called me Mac, by grabs!—'this thing has got to stop right here and now,' says he. 'What I want to know is if you're going to do your part toward stopping it.' Natchelly, I said I would, after I'd wore out my lay-off. 'Humph!' says he, savage as a bear with a sore head, 'don't you be reminding me that I ought to lay you off. You go home and sleep the clock 'round once or twice, and see if you can't get over taking cat-naps on your engine.'"

"My God!" said Jurgins. "Didn't hang you up?"

"No; he didn't hang me up."

Again the wind-straw was taken for what it might indicate, and the expiring esprit du corps of the Dolomite Short Line began to show signs of returning animation. One black night Jerry Lafferty, on whose section the beautiful freight wreck had occurred, was moved to turn out of his comfortable bunk shanty, after working hours, to have a look at a dangerous bit of bank in a rock cutting: result, the finding of a sizable land-slip on the track, and the saving of Number Four from a probable wreck.

A few nights later, Dolan, running a heavy ore train down from Dolomite, felt the surge and jerk betokening a broken coupling. He might have jumped. In similar straits other men had been saving themselves and letting things take their course. But Dolan yelled at his fireman and stuck to his engine; played touch-and-go with the runaway tail-end until he had brought all safely to and—but the sequel was in the superintendent's office.

"Want to see you, Mike? Of course I did. You're a man after my own heart; put it there"—namely, into the outstretched palm of the boss. "The first vacancy in the passenger runs is yours. Not a word—I know what you'd say if you could get your wild-Irish tongue loose, and I'm too busy to listen to you this morning. Go home and rest up."

"Holy Mother!" muttered Dolan to himself in the outer office—to himself, but in the hearing of little Cranston; "'tis a man, afther all—a man, mind you, wid two legs an' a fisht an' a hear-rt in 'im!"

Thus and thus came the embers of a common humanity to a glow. All along the line of the hazardous, man-killing mountain railroad the happenings grew less frequent, as little by little the loose threads of the rank and file became knitted into the firm strand of loyalty. Yet it was a little deed of Upham's—of the man, Gebhart Upham, minus his title and official position—that finally fanned the embers into the blaze of brotherhood.

It chanced on the run of the president's inspection special from Shunt Pass to Castle Cliff, on a certain radiant October afternoon when disaster seemed afar off, and for Upham the world held nothing more alluring than the slim, lithe figure of a sweet-faced young woman who had been sitting out the glorious afternoon with him on the rear platform of the private car. But the fates were busy, just the same.

The private car, drawn by the hundred-ton eight-wheeler, 1026, Bloodgood, engineer, was running as second section of the day express, with fifteen minutes between. In a park-like opening of the canyon, on Pat Shannon's section, an east-bound freight lay on the blind siding which was its meeting-point with Number One. The orders were all straight. Johnson, conductor of the freight, read them a second time to Hollingsworth, his engineer. The first section of Train One had passed, carrying a flag for the second section, and Shannon and his men were replacing a worn rail in the main line just opposite the waiting freight-train's engine.

"I wouldn't take chances on that, Pat, between trains, if I were you," called Johnson, from his post at the freight engine's step, thereby showing how far expiring esprit du corps had come on the road to recovery.

"'Tis all safe; the slow-flag's out," said the trackman, with a fling of his hand toward the bit of green bunting fluttering between the rails a hundred yards up the line. Then he added: "There's plinty av time. It's the prisidint's privit', an' I'll be givin' her the new shteel for her christenin' av ut. Move, now! move now!"—to his men. "Out wid it, lively, boys!"

The rail replacement went on swiftly. Hollingsworth, squatting in the gangway of his engine, glanced at his watch.

"Pat is taking chances," he remarked to Johnson. "Bloodgood 'll be due here in two minutes, making Number One's time—which ain't a rod less than forty miles an hour. If he don't happen to see that green rag——"

The sentence was never finished. Out of the canyon portal stormed the 1026, working steam! Hollingsworth tumbled from his perch with a yell that dominated the roar of the oncoming train.

"Patsy, your flag's down!"

Simultaneously there was a frantic dash of three men up the track, with Hollingsworth in the lead wildly swinging his stripped coat. At the same instant the fireman on the freight engine set the canyon echoes clamoring with a shrill call for brakes.

"What's that?" demanded Upham, starting up out of his love reverie at Miss Hazleton's side.

The answer came up out of the dust whirl under the rear trucks of the flying car in the shape of a green flag, tattered and with a broken staff. Upham jumped for the platform brake-cord, and the whistle of the air was exactly coincident with a plunging shock from the big engine. Then he swung far out over the hand-rail for a look ahead. What he saw, as the car slowed to safety under its own air-brake, was the great engine, free and apparently beyond control, thundering down upon a gap in the rails.

"Good God!" he gasped, as the car stopped jerkily, and the big engine, having reached the gap, reeled and toppled over into the river. And then: "Don't look, Kate—it's too horrible! Stay where you are till I come back!" Whereupon he cleared the hand-rail at a bound and ran to join the little group of train and section-men at the point of disaster.

"Where are the enginemen? Did they jump?" he cried.

It was Hollingsworth who answered, shouting to make himself heard above the hissing, spluttering din of the half-submerged engine.

"Johnny Shovel got off; but Bart went down with her. He's in the cab."

Upham had drawn off his shoes and was struggling out of his coat. Pat Shannon, crying like a child, laid hold of him.

"'Tis no use at all, at all, Misther Upham!" he wailed. "'Twould cook the meat off your bones!"

Upham shook him off roughly and turned to Brice, who had just come up with the entire private-car party at his heels.

"Take charge here, Dick," he snapped. "I'm going to dive for him. Get the men in line to help us out."

"You will be scalded to death!" said the president, trying, as Shannon had, to dissuade him.

"It's a man's life," said Upham coolly, and with that he picked his place and plunged.

It was a terrible interval before he reappeared, some distance below the boiling caldron, but he was gripping a bruised and disfigured, but still struggling Bloodgood, when the human lifeline formed quickly and drew him out. What happened afterward was told graphically by Hollingsworth to an eager audience in the round-house tool-room that same night.

"It's just as I'm telling you, boys; he was about as near dead as Bloodgood when we snaked 'em out of the river, but he was hangin' on to Bart's collar so't we had to prize his fingers apart to get 'em loose. Then that little gal came flutterin' down the bank and—oh, my! it made me wisht I was young and pretty again—pitched her arms around 'Little Millions' and cried over him right there and then, before the whole kit and b'ilin' of us; and there wa'n't anybody snickerin' now, you bet!

"Soon as he could stand up and get his breath he laughed like it was a piece in play. 'See here,' says he, 'you're all daffy over the wrong man. Bloodgood is your hero. Don't you see he broke loose from that car because he knew he couldn't hold it and his hundred tons of locomotive, too? Get him up into the car, men, and we'll take that freight engine and hunt a doctor. He's pretty badly hurt.'"

There was little said by the listeners. There be some deeds too large for comment. But that night into every telegraph office on the line there trickled, between the business clickings of the sounders, the story of "Little Millions's" plunge into the boiling pot; and plain-faced men in overclothes, hearing the wire talk, banged their fists on the operators' tables and swore fealty to the man they had derided. And Jerry Lafferty was not the only man who walked his section after working hours.

And Upham? Two men sat late that night in the smoking-room of the Cliffs Inn at Castle Cliff; sat long after the president and Arthur and Reddick and the deputation of welcoming citizens had departed.

"I suppose it's you to quit us and go home, Gebby—now that you know Miss Hazleton's sentiments at large," said Brice when the bedtime pipes were gurgling in the bowl.

Upham rose and put his back to the fire in the great stone arch.

"Do I?" he queried. "You think I'd better quit while my record is good? Not for a farm in paradise, Dick. I've had it out with Kate, you know, and here I stay until I've made good with the rank and file. I'll get the hang of it, after a while."

"Ah," said Brice, "I think you've got it now, Gebby. Do you know what they call you?"

Upham made a wry face. "'Little Millions,' isn't it?"

"Yes; and from this day it will be 'our Little Millions' and you'd be foolish to swap it for a title. Your troubles are over."

And they were.