By the hot noon we were above the river valley and winding up the folds of fir-forest that clothed the shaggy shoulders of the mountain. Engine No. 100 puffed and strained, and reeled up before us like a drunken man. We had had our dinner; the sexes began to separate, and even the Langworthy baby went to sleep. Raoul and May were riding on the engine. I left Miss Jeanie Bruce and joined the gentlemen, who were sitting cross-legged and contented in the smoking end of the car, from the glass-housed platform of which we looked already back upon the great central plain from the rising Appalachians. “Oh, it’s a glorious country,” said “Colonel” Coe; and, I think, winked at me. “Why, senator,” said the judge, “I have seen a corner-lot sold at Bagdad six times in one day, ’n a thousan’ dollars higher every time.” “General,” said the senator, “do you know what the original purchase of the Bagdad Land and Investment Company aggregated--for the whole eighteen hundred acres?” There was a silence. Everybody looked at me. It dawned upon me that I was the “general,” and I wondered why I ranked poor Coe. “I’ve no idea,” I hastened to add; fearing the senator had followed Coe’s wink. “Thirty thousand dollars,” answered General McBride, as if it were a game of “School-teacher.” “And they sold three hundred acres for----” “Fifteen hundred thousand dollars,” resumed Judge Hankinson, with intense solemnity. “Paper?” said Tim Healy. “Cash, Captain Healy,” said the judge, fiercely, “cash.” “I want to know!--Was that the lot you bought of Widow Enraghty, judge?” A roar of laughter greeted Tim’s answer. People tipped back their chairs, slapping their thighs; the Langworthy baby woke up and cried, and even the judge screwed up his whiskey-softened old face in vain. “Tell us about it, judge,” said Raoul, who had come back from the engine and was peering over our shoulders. “I’m a young lawyer, and I want to know these tricks.”