The last page I had dictated the day before, which he'd been transcribing from his notes, lay in front of him; the gas was still burning directly above him, and a shade he wore over his weak eyes had been knocked awry as his poor old bald head went bumping down on the type-writer before him. The thing that favored me was Tausig's distrust of everybody connected with him. He hates his partners only a bit less than he hates the men outside the Trust. The bigger and richer the Syndicate grows, the more power and prosperity it has, the more he begrudges them their share of it; the more he wants it all for himself. He is madly suspicious of his clerks, and hires others to watch them, to spy upon them. He is continually moving his valuables from place to place, partly because he trusts no man; partly because he's so deathly afraid his right hand will find out what his left is doing. He is a full partner of Braun and Lowenthal--with mental reservations. He has no confidence in either of them. Half his schemes he keeps from them; the other half he tells them--part of. He's for ever afraid that the Syndicate of which he's the head will fall to pieces and become another Syndicate of which he won't be head. It all makes him an unhappy, restless little beast; but it helped me to-day. If it'd been any question of safe combinations and tangled things like that, the game would have been all up for Nancy O. But in his official safe Tausig keeps only such papers as he wants Braun and Lowenthal to see. And in his private desk in his private office he keeps-- I stole past Mason, sleeping with his forehead on the type-writer keys--he'll be lettered like the obelisk when he wakes up--and crept into the next room to see just what Tausig keeps in that private desk of his. Oh, yes, it was locked. But hadn't I been carrying the key to it every minute for the last forty-eight hours? There must be a mine of stuff in that desk of Tausig's, Mag. The touch of every paper in it is slimy with some dirty trick, some bad secret, some mean action. It's a pity that I hadn't time to go through 'em all; it would have been interesting; but under a bundle of women's letters, which that old fox keeps for no good reason, I'll bet, I lit on a paper that made my heart go bumping like a cart over cobbles. Yes, there it was, just as Obermuller had vowed it was, with Tausig's cramped little signature followed by Heffelfinger's, Dixon's and Weinstock's; a scheme to crush the business life out of men by the cleverest, up-to-date Trust deviltry; a thing that our Uncle Sammy just won't stand for. And neither will Nancy Olden, Miss Monahan. She grabbed that precious paper with a gasp of delight and closed the desk. But she bungled a bit there, for Mason lifted his head and blinked dazedly at her for a moment, recognized her and shook his head. "No--work to-day," he said. "No--I know. I'll just look over what we've done, Mr. Mason," she answered cheerfully.