This morning, however, there was a touch of genuine enthusiasm about Fitz. He rushed into the office, caught up the blue bundle and the map, nearly upsetting the colonel, who was balanced back in his chair with his long legs over the desk,--a favorite attitude when down town,--rushed out, and returned in half an hour with a fat body surmounted by a bald head fringed about with gray curls. [Illustration] He was the advance agent of that mysterious combination known to the financial world as an "English syndicate," an elusive sort of commercial sea-serpent with its head in London and its tail around the globe. The "inquiry" which had so gladdened the colonel's heart the morning ofthe breakfast with aunt Nancy had proceeded from this rotund negotiator. The colonel had, as usual, started the road at Cartersville, and had gotten as far as the double-span iron bridge over the Tench when the rotund gentleman asked abruptly,-- "How far are you from a coal-field?" The colonel lifted the point of his pen, adjusted his glasses, and punched a hole in the rumpled map within a hair's breadth of a black dot labeled "Cartersville." "Right there, suh. Within a stone's throw of our locomotives." Fitz looked into the hole with as much astonishment as if it were the open mouth of the mine itself. "Hard or soft?" said the stout man. "Soft, suh, and fairly good coal, I understand, although I have never used it, suh; my ancestors always burned wood." Fitz heard the statement in undisguised wonder. In all his intercourse with the colonel he had never before known him to depart so much as a razor's edge from the truth. The fat man communed with himself a moment, and then said suddenly, "I'll take the papers and give you an answer in a week," and hurried away. "Do you really mean, Colonel," said Fitz, determined to pin him down, "that there is a single pound of coal in Cartersville?" "Do I mean it, Fitz? Don't it crop out in half a dozen spots right on our own place? One haalf of my estate, suh, is a coal-field." "You never told me a word about it." "I don't know that I did, Fitz. But it has never been of any use to me. Besides, suh, we have plenty of wood. We never burn coal at Caarter Hall." Fitz did not take that view of it. He went into an exhaustive cross-examination of the colonel on the coal question: who had tested it, the character of the soil, width of the vein, and dip of the land. This information he carefully recorded in a small book which he took from his inside pocket. Loosened from Fitz's pinioning grasp, the colonel, entirely oblivious to his friend's sudden interest in the coal-field, and slightly impatient at the delay, bounded like a balloon with its anchors cut. "An answer from the syndicate within a week! My dear Fitz, I see yo' drift. You have kept the Garden Spots for the foreign investors. That man is impressed, suh; I saw it in his eye."