"Yes, Jim," answered a pleasant voice, and Mrs. Wallingford, in a stunning gown which, supplementing her hair and eyes, made of her a symphony in brown, came from the adjoining room. She shook hands cordially with Mr. Daw and sat down with an inquiring look at her husband. "It's time for us to take up a collection," said the latter gentleman. "We're going ay-wye." "Ya-as, ay-wye from he-_ah_!" supplemented Blackie to no one in particular. "Won't your ring and scarf pin do?" his wife inquired anxiously of Mr. Wallingford. A "collection," in their parlance, meant the sacrifice of a last resource, and she was a woman of experience. "You know they won't," he returned in mild reproach. "If I don't keep a front I know where my ticket reads to; the first tank!" Without any further objection she brought him a little black leather case, which he opened. An agreeable glitter sparkled from its velvet depths, and he passed it to his friend with a smile of satisfaction. "They'll please Uncle, eh, Blackie?" he observed. "The first thing to do, after I cash these, is to look at the map and pick out a fresh town where smart people have money in banks. It always helps a lot to remember that somewhere in this big United States people have been saving up coin for years, just waiting for us to come and get it." The two men laughed, but Mrs. Wallingford did not. "Honest, I'm tired of it," she confessed. "If this speculation of Jim's had only turned out luckily I wanted to buy a little house and live quietly and--and decently for a year or so." Mr. Daw glanced at her in amusement. "She wants to be respectable!" he gasped in mock surprise. "All women do," she said, still earnestly. "You wouldn't last three months," he informed her. "You'd join the village sewing circle and the culture club, and paddle around in a giddy whirl of pale functions till you saw you had to keep your mouth shut all the time for fear the other women would find out you knew something. Then you'd quit." "You talk as if you had been crossed in love," she consoled him. "That's because I'm in pain," confessed Blackie. "It hasn't been an hour since I saw a thousand dollars in real money, and the telegraph company jerked it away from me just as I reached out to bring it home." "_Is_ there that much money in the world?" inquired Wallingford. "Not loose," replied Blackie. "I thought I had this lump pried off, but now it's got a double padlock on it and to-night it starts far, far back to that dear old metropolis of the Big Thick Water, where the windy river looks like a fresh-plowed field. But they've coin out there, and every time I think of Mr. James Clover and his thousand I'm tempted to go down to his two-dollar hotel and coax him up a dark alley." "Who does Mr. Clover do?" inquired Wallingford perfunctorily. Blackie's sense of humor came uppermost to soothe his anguished feelings.