J. Hayden Witherbee, composing the firm of Witherbee & Company, bankers, had a cozy flytrap or office suite in one of the tallest and most ornate of the office buildings or spider-webs in the downtown financial district. This location was but a natural one, seeing that Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee's interests were widely scattered and diversified, including as they did the formation and construction--on paper and with paper--of trolley lines; the floating of various enterprises, which floated the more easily by reason of the fact that water was their native element; and the sale of what are known in the West as holes in the ground and in the East as permanent mining investments. He rode to and from business in a splendid touring car trained to stop automatically at at least three cafés on the way up town of an evening; and he had in his employ a competent staff, including a grayish gentle-man of a grim and stolid aspect, named Betts. Being a man of affairs, and many of them, Mr. Witherbee had but small time for general newspaper reading, save and except only the market quotations, the baseball scores in season and the notices of new shows for tired business men, though keeping a weather eye ever out for stories touching on the pernicious activities of the Federal Grand Jury, with its indictments and summonses and warrants, and of the United States Post-Office Department, with its nasty habit of issuing fraud orders and tying up valuable personal mail. Nevertheless, on a certain wintry afternoon about two o'clock or half-past two, when his office boy brought to him a small card, engraved--no, not engraved; printed--smudgily printed with the name of William Pitman Priest and the general address of Kentucky, the sight of the card seemed to awaken within him certain amusing stories which had lately fallen under his attention in the printed columns; and, since he never overlooked any bets--even the small ones--he told the boy to show the gentleman in. The reader, I take it, being already acquainted with the widely varying conversational characteristics of Judge Priest and Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee, it would be but a waste of space and time for me to undertake to describe in detail the manner of their meeting on this occasion. Suffice it to say that the judge was shown into Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee's private office; that he introduced himself, shook hands with Mr. Witherbee, and in response to an invitation took a seat; after which he complimented Mr. Witherbee upon the luxury and good taste of his surroundings, and remarked that it was seasonable weather, considering the Northern climate and the time of the year. And then, being requested to state the nature of his business, he told Mr. Witherbee he had called in the hope of interesting him in an industrial property located in the South. It was at this juncture that Mr. Witherbee pressed a large, dark cigar upon his visitor.