gentleman who expected to be the president of the Steering-Grierson Company, that is not a pleasant programme; yet, my dear Carington, my circumstances are so precarious that I might attempt to fill it, if I did not see through Madeira's lack of principle, negatively speaking,--rascality, positively speaking. Now, I may have winked one eye occasionally during my business career, but I have never yet been able to shut both at once. It may be taste and it may be morals. Heretofore I have taken business too casually really to know how I am equipped for it. I have never before really met myself, spoken to myself, as I hustled through the few commercial hours of each day of my life. But out here business has become a thing of wider import on the instant, and already I am face to face with something stiff and hard on the inside of me that promises not to be very malleable under Madeira's hands. Madeira's hands, my dear boy, are pot-black. The plan that with us was a fair and square enterprise has become with him a clap-trap scheme to rob investors. I don't know how he means to do it, but he will do it. There is a chance that the company may get good money out of the Canaan Tigmores in zinc, but there is a much richer chance that Madeira will get good money out of the company, zinc or no zinc. So here I am in a pleasant situation. I can take my choice between a block of shares in the new company, my vote to be in Madeira's control, and a place far back, where I can watch Madeira operate my land to his profit while I wait for old Grierson to die. I am holding off as yet, dazzled by both prospects. Meantime the organisation of Madeira's company is being effected among the local capitalists, the store-keepers and the substantial farmers, and it's only a question of a few days until the directorate shuts in my face. Madeira is to take me over to Joplin to-morrow,--to let the showing there have its effect upon me, to let me catch the ore fever, I suspect. Immediately upon my arrival here, I looked into the history of my relationship to Grierson, and also looked up the record of the Peele will. Grierson is the grandson of one of the sisters of old Bruce Peele, while I am the great-great-grandson of another sister. My great-grandfather did not like pioneer life and went back East to live and cultivate the Steering family-tree into me, as the last, topmast, splendid blossom. The Grierson family stayed in Missouri and petered out into this Bruce Grierson. He is of my grandfather's generation, though he is a much younger man than a grandfather of mine could possibly be with the record of my age and my father's age to be accounted for. [Illustration: Two branches of the family tree.] I got profoundly excited in studying out the two branches of the family that are involved in the entail. Here is a map of the relationship for your benefit. You can understand from that, can't you, Carington?[1]