There were half a dozen versions of the story, Jimmie found; some declared that the outraged husband had caught young Granitch in his home and had fetched a surgeon there; others that he had taken him to a hospital; others that the operation had been performed in a road-house near by. But none mentioned the tenant-house on the farm of John Cutter, and Jimmie wrapped himself in his pride of superior knowledge, and let the loungers in the country store chatter on. He would go back each night for new gossip; and first he heard that old man Granitch was meaning to have all the conspirators arrested and sent to jail; but then it was said that young Lacey had left the hospital and vanished, no one knew where. And they never knew; never again did he appear to curse the strikers at the Empire, nor to break the hearts of chorus-girls on the Great White Way! His grim old father's hair turned grey in a few weeks; and while he went on to fill his contracts with the Russian government, all men knew that his heart was eaten out with grief and rage and shame. Jimmie and his wife held numerous confabulations over those twenty-dollar bills. What should they do with their fortune? The Worker, always in need of funds, was just now issuing bonds in small denominations, and Jimmie could not imagine any better financial investment than a working-class paper; but Lizzie, alas, could not be made to see it. And then his eye was caught by an advertisement of an oil-company, published in a Socialist paper, which lifted it above suspicion. But again Lizzie blocked the way. She begged her visionary husband to turn the money over to her; she argued that half of it belonged to her anyhow--had she not done her part to earn it? “What part?” Jimmie asked; and she answered that she had kept quiet--and what more had he done? Eleeza Betooser wanted that treasure to insure safety for the children through whatever troubles might come to their propagandist father. And finally the propagandist father gave way, and the woman proceeded to secure the money in the ancient way of her sex. She took the ten crisp bills and sewed them in a layer of cloth, and wound the cloth about the ankle of her right leg, and sewed it there, and put a stocking over it to hide it. And that apparatus would stay there--day or night, winter or summer, it would never part from its owner. She would be a walking bank, a bank that she knew was safe from panic or crisis; the feeling of the two hundred dollars about her ankle would be communicated to every part of Lizzie--warming her heart, delighting her brain, and stimulating her liver and digestion. II