did. He was so big, so solid looking, so much like substantial

prosperity itself. A huge diamond glowed from his finger. It must be worth several hundred dollars. Another one gleamed from his scarf. His clothing was of the latest cut and the finest material. Even his socks, in the narrow rim which showed above his low-cut shoes, were silk; she could see that clear across the room.

The door opened, and a girl of seventeen or eighteen came in. That she was unusually pretty was attested by the suddenly widening eyes of Mr. Wallingford.

"And is this your daughter Minnie?" asked the benevolent gentleman, all his protecting and fostering instincts aroused.

Mrs. Bishop, in a flutter, presented her younger daughter to the fortune-bringing gentlemen, and Minnie fluttered a bit on her own account. She knew she was pretty; she read in the eyes of the wealthy-looking, perfectly groomed Mr. Wallingford that she was pretty; she saw in the smile of Mr. Clover that she was pretty, and her vanity was pleased inordinately.

A sudden brilliant idea came to Mr. Wallingford.

"I have the solution to your problem, Mrs. Bishop," he said. "We shall need more help in our offices, and your daughter shall have the place. She can soon earn more money than she ever could in a store, and can secure as good a training as she could in a business college. How would you like that, Miss Bishop?"

"I think it would be fine," replied the young lady, with a large-eyed glance toward Mr. Wallingford.

The glance was more of habit than intent. Minnie's mirror and what she had heard from her boy friends had given her an impulse toward coquetry. It was pleasant to feel her power, to see what instantaneous impression she could make upon grown men. Such a friendly party it was! Everybody was pleased, and in the end Mr. Wallingford and Mr. Clover walked away from the house with Mrs. Bishop's check and her receipt and her policy in their pockets.

Mr. Clover was lost in profound admiration.

"It worked, all right!" he said exultantly to Mr. Neil, as soon as they returned to the dingy little office. "Here's the thousand dollars," and he threw down the check. "Good Lord! I couldn't believe but that thousand was gone; and then if another man died he would put us on the toboggan."

Mr. Neil was a thin young man whose forehead wore the perpetual frown of slow thought. Also his cuffs were ragged. He was the Supreme Exalted Secretary.

"Now may I have fifty?" he inquired in an aside to Clover. "My board bill, you know."

"Certainly not!" declared the Supreme Exalted Ruler with loud rectitude. "This thousand dollars belongs in the insurance reserve fund."

"Tut, tut," interposed Wallingford. "Your alarm clock is out of order. You just now paid a death claim with that money, and the reserve fund is out that much. A private individual, however, just now bought a thousand dollars' worth of stock in the reorganized Friendly Hands Trust Company, and you have the pay in advance. Let Mr. Neil have his fifty dollars, and give me a check for my two hundred and fifty; then we'll go out to hunt a decent suite of offices and buy the furniture for it."

"There wouldn't be much of the thousand left after that," objected Mr. Clover, frowning.

"Why not? You don't suppose we are going to pay cash for anything, do you?" returned Wallingford in surprise. "My credit's good, if yours isn't."

His credit! He had not been in town four hours! As Mr. Clover looked him over again, however, he saw where he was wrong. Mr. Wallingford's mere appearance was as good as a bond. He would not ask for credit; he would take it. Mr. Clover, in a quick analysis of this thought, decided that this rich man's resources were so vast that they shone through his very bearing. Mr. Wallingford, at that same moment, after having paid his enormous hotel bill in New York and the expenses of his luxurious trip, had only ten dollars in the world.

"Now then," suggested Mr. Clover as he passed the hypnotically won check to his new partner, "we might as well conclude our personal business. I'll make you over half my stock in the company, and take your two thousand."

"All right," agreed Wallingford very cheerfully, and they both sat down to write.

Mr. Clover transferred to Mr. Wallingford forty-three shares of stock in the Friendly Hands Trust Company, Incorporated, and received a rectangular slip of paper in return. His face reddened as he examined it.

"Why, this isn't a check!" he said sharply. "It's a note for ninety days!"

"Sure!" said J. Rufus Wallingford. "In our talk there wasn't a word said about cash."

"But cash is what I want, and nothing but cash!" exploded the other, smacking his hairy fist upon his desk.

"How foolish!" chided J. Rufus smilingly. "I see I'll have to teach you a lot about business. Draw up your chairs and get my plan in detail. If, after that, Clover, you do not want my note, you may give it back and go broke in your own way. Here's what we will do. We will organize a new operating company for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, in twenty-five-dollar shares. We will buy over the old ten-thousand-dollar company for one hundred and fifty thousand in stock of the new company. Dividing this pro rata, you and I, Clover, will each have nearly twenty-six hundred shares. Mr. Neil, in place of his present ten shares, will have six hundred, and we shall have left four thousand shares of treasury stock. These we will sell among your members. We will reduce your present insurance rate one fourth, and use the hundred thousand dollars we take in on stock sales to get new members to whom to sell more stock. In the meantime, we'll see money every day. You and I, Clover, will each draw a hundred a week, and I think Mr. Neil will be pretty well satisfied if he drags down fifty."

The pleased expression upon Mr. Neil's face struggled with the deepening creases on his brow. Fifteen dollars a week was the most he had ever earned in his life, but he was so full of fraternal insurance figures that his skin prickled.

"But how about the insurance end of it?" he interposed. "How will we ever keep up at that ridiculously low rate? That might do for a while, but as our membership becomes older the death rate will increase on us and we can't pay it. Why, the mortality tables--" and he reached for the inevitable facts and figures.

"Who's talking about insurance?" demanded Wallingford. "I'm talking about how to get money. Put up the little red dope-book. Clover, you get busy right away and write a lot of circus literature about the grand work your members will be doing for the widows and orphans by buying this stock; also how much dividend it will pay them. When the treasury stock is sold, and we have a big enough organization to absorb it, we will begin to unload our own shares and get out. If you clean up your sixty-four thousand dollars in this year, I guess you will be willing to let the stockholders elect new officers and conduct their own Friendly Hands Trust Company any way they please, won't you?"

Mr. Clover quietly folded Mr. Wallingford's note and put it in his pocket.

"Let's go out and rent some new offices," he said.

He came back, at Mr. Neil's call, to write out that fifty-dollar check, and incidentally made out one for himself in a like amount.

"What do you think of him, anyhow?" asked Neil with a troubled countenance.

"Think of him?" repeated Clover with enthusiasm. "He's the greatest ever! If I had known him five years ago I'd be worth a million to-day!"

"But is this scheme on the level?" asked Neil.

"That's the beauty of it," said Clover, exulting like a schoolboy. "The law can't touch us any place."

"Maybe not," admitted Neil; "but somehow I don't quite like it."

"I guess you'll like your fifty a week when it begins to come in, and your fifteen thousand when we clean up," retorted Clover.

"You bet!" said Neil, but he began to do some bewildered figuring on his own account. His head was in a whirl.