"Wonder how he felt next morning?" queried another. "Felt like an infernal donkey!" Hillerton declared, flinging away a cigar-stump and taking his legs down from the desk. Then Peckham turned himself round to face the crowd, and said, in a tone of quiet conviction: "The man was all right. If you only want anything bad enough, no price is too high to pay for it." This was a sentiment which every one was bound to respect--every one, at least, excepting Hillerton. "Sounds very well, Peckham," he said, "but it won't hold water." The most surprising thing about Peckham's little speculations was that they all succeeded. It made the other men rather mad because he did not care more. "But that's always the way," Freddy Dillingham remarked, with an air of profound philosophy. "It's the fellers that don't care a darn that have all the luck." When Peckham sold out of the Libby Carew, he doubled his money, and the moment he touched the "Trailing Arbutus," up she went. By the first of May he found himself the possessor of nearly three thousand dollars' worth of "stuff" distributed among several ventures. Of course, he was credited with five times as much, and the other men began to think that if he did not set up a dogcart pretty soon, or at least a yellow buckboard, they should have their opinion of him. If the truth must be known, Peckham would not have given a nickle for a dozen dog-carts. It was all very well to make a little money; it was the first time he had discovered a taste for anything in the nature of a game, and the higher the stakes came to be, the more worth while it seemed. Nevertheless, his mind, in those days of early May, when he was steadily rising in the esteem of his associates, was very little occupied with the calculation of his profits.