“See here, John, you’ve got to be careful about this Campbell business!” Mr. Ward’s tone was severe. “I know without your telling me you inspired that piece in this morning’s paper. Campbell never saw me in his life and that article gives the impression that he and I are old cronies. It’s going to cause us all a lot of embarrassment. It won’t do!” “Sorry if it bothers you, father; but there’s nothing untrue in that article. You’ll be the only man in town who can get Campbell’s ear. If he refuses to interest himself in a new freight house and that sort of thing, that’s his affair.” The stenographer knocked to announce Mr. Pickett. “Say to him,” replied John, indifferently, “that we are in conference but he can see us in just a moment.” “Pickett!” exclaimed Ward, senior, as the door closed. “What on earth brings him here!” “The Campbells are coming,” replied John with a grin. “Pickett’s president of the Water Power Company, and he wants to line us up to get Campbell interested in making a new bond deal.” “Humph! If that’s what he wants I like his nerve. We don’t even speak when we meet.” “You’ll be speaking now! Let’s go out and give him the glad hand of brotherly greeting.” A little diffident at first, Wesley T. Pickett warmed under the spell of the Wards’ magnanimity. “I’ve regretted very much our little differences----” he began. “There’s no feeling on our side at all, Mr. Pickett,” John declared and his father, a little dazed, murmured his acquiescence in this view of the matter, and eyed with interest a formidable bundle of documents in Pickett’s hands. “Fact is,” remarked Pickett, with a sheepish grin as he re-crossed his legs, “you were dead right on that matter of the pollution of the river. Swiggert probably did the best he could with our defense but you were right when you told me I’d save money and avoid arousing hostile feeling in the community by pleading guilty.” “It’s always disagreeable to be obliged to tell a man he hasn’t a good case,” Ward announced. “Well, I want you to know I respect you for your honesty. Swiggert encouraged me to think he might get us off on some technical defect in the statute, and it cost me a two thousand dollar fee to find he was wrong.” “The point he raised was an interesting one,” Ward remarked mildly, “and he might have made it stick.” “But he didn’t!” Pickett retorted a little savagely. “Now I got a matter I want the God’s truth about, absolutely. It’s a row I’ve got into with a few of my stockholders in the glass company. The fools got the idea of freezing me out! It’s all in these papers, and I want you to give it all the time it needs, but I want an opinion,--no more than you can get on a letter sheet. Swiggert uses too many words and I’ve got to have a yes or no.” The thought of being frozen out caused Mr. Pickett to swell with indignation. He turned from father to son in an unvoiced but eloquent appeal to be saved from so monstrous and impious an assault upon his dignity.