"If you have come to speak for these men," he said, "you may step in here, and we will see if we can arrange to have the directors meet them later." "Well, Mr. Wade," he remarked, when they were alone, "so you have become a magnate in the north country in strictly record time!" "Sarcasm won't help us any in settling this matter!" cried the young man, warmly. "I can understand very well, Mr. Barrett, how you from your position look down on me in mine. But I have at least become some sort of a business man, and I--" "You have become an almighty good business man," declared the land baron, with such a ring of sincerity in his voice that the young man stared at him in sudden astonishment, "and in a little while we will talk business." "That is all I'm here to talk," said Wade, the red coming into his cheeks. When he had left the group of the lumbermen he noticed that some of them bent lowering looks upon him. They had seen other men invited apart and bought from their purpose. Wade wondered if the Honorable John Davis Barrett was not about to trade amnesty on the Blunder dam charge for betrayal of the men who had come at his back to "Castle Cut 'Em." Then a sense of shame at such suspicion came to him, as John Barrett began to speak: "Mr. Wade," said he, "you are more of a chap in every way than you were the last time you were in this office, but--you are still young." From that moment the older man had the advantage. And yet Barrett was not calm. He sat down at his desk, and tossed his papers as he talked. His gaze wavered. His jowls hung heavy and flabby. The marks of his prostrating illness had not left him. But in the gloom of his face there was depression that did not arise from physical causes. Barrett's bitter experience had drawn its black cloud around him. He pulled out the shelf of his desk, set his elbows upon it as though to steady his nerves, and faced Wade. "Young man," he began, "the way the world looks at those things--from the stand-point of some one who hasn't been through the fire--I can afford to look down on you from my height as a moneyed man, and as something more in this State. An outsider might think so. But, by ----, you are the one that can look down on me, for you are square and clean!" He would not allow Wade to interrupt. "I haven't called you in here to buy or bulldoze you. There is a matter between us that hasn't been settled. I made you a promise on Jerusalem Mountain that I didn't keep. I had excuses that seemed good to me then. They don't look that way now. They didn't look good to me when I got off my sick-bed at Castonia. Did Rodburd Ide tell you anything about my talk with the girl?" "He told me, Mr. Barrett." The magnate plunged on desperately.