After making good Dic's loss of twenty-six hundred dollars,--which sum, you may remember, went to Bays,--Little had remaining in his strong-box notes to the amount of two thousand dollars, which, together with his small stock of goods and two or three hundred dollars in cash, constituted the total sum of his worldly wealth. He had reached a point in life where he plainly saw old age staring him in the face--an ugly stare which few can return with equanimity. The small bundle of notes was all that stood between him and want when that time should come "sans everything." But Williams was staring Rita in the face, and if the little hoard could save her, she was welcome to it. Billy's sleep the night after he received Rita's letter was meagre and disturbed, but next morning he took his notes and his poor little remainder of cash and went to Indianapolis. He discounted the notes, as he had done in Dic's case, and with the proceeds he went to the store of Fisher and Bays. Fisher was present when Billy entered the private office and announced his readiness to supply the firm with twenty-three hundred dollars on their note of hand. The money, of course, being borrowed by the firm, went to the firm account, and was at once applied by Fisher upon one of the many Williams notes. Therefore Tom's "overdrafts" remained _in statu quo_; likewise the penitentiary. The payment of Billy Little's twenty-three hundred dollars upon the Williams debt did not help matters in the least. The notes owed by the firm of Fisher and Bays to the Williams house aggregated nearly fourteen thousand dollars, and Billy's poor little all did not stem the tide of importunity one day, although it left him penniless. The thought of his poverty was of course painful to Billy, but he rode home that evening without seeing Rita, happy and exultant in the mistaken belief that he had helped to save her from the grasp of Williams. That same evening at supper Tom, Sr., told of Billy Little's loan, and there was at once an outburst of wrath from mother and son because part of the money had not been applied to Tom's "overdraft." "The pitiful sum of twenty-three hundred dollars!" cried Tom. "The old skinflint might as well have kept his money for all the good it will do us. Do you think that will keep Williams from suing us?" In Tom's remarks Mrs. Bays concurred, saying that she "always knew he was a mean old miser."