Less than a week after this Tucker telegraphed to know if Murray had changed his mind about disposing of any stock. “No,” was the reply sent back. “All right,” Tucker answered. “I just wanted to give Mrs. Tucker another slice of your company. She has a little of it already.” Investigation showed that the broker had succeeded in picking up a few shares, but hardly enough to exert any considerable influence. Still, it was disquieting to find the Tuckers so persistent. “I’ll bet,” said Murray, “that mental worry has put me where you wouldn’t pass me for a risk.” “If your wife,” returned the doctor, “is anything like Mrs. Tucker I’d pass you for any kind of risk rather than incur her displeasure. They’ll begin to take a stock-holder’s interest in the affairs of this particular office pretty soon.” “The affairs are in good shape,” declared Murray. “But a real determined stock-holder can stir up a devil of a rumpus over nothing,” asserted the doctor. “If she should send all those physicians’ reports to headquarters, they would rather offset my report on which he was turned down, and the company would feel that it had lost a good thing. The company will not stop to think that my report may have been justified by conditions at the time.” “And the risk that I thought too big for him then may not seem too big for him now,” commented Murray ruefully. “I’d like to examine him again,” said the doctor. “I don’t think it would be safe,” returned Murray, “unless you were searched for weapons first.” So the doctor and Murray settled down to await, with some anxiety, the next move in the game, and their patience was rewarded by the receipt of five certificates of health from as many different physicians, each certificate having a message of some sort scribbled across the top. “The patient had to ride a hundred miles to get these,” Mrs. Tucker had written on the first. “There were a few shares of this stock in my late lamented uncle’s estate,” appeared in Tucker’s handwriting on the second. “The president of your company is rusticating a few miles from here,” Mrs. Tucker asserted on the third. “Better come out here for a few days,” Tucker urged on the fourth. “Poor Ralph!” was Mrs. Tucker’s comment on the fifth. “Poor Dave Murray!” grumbled Murray, and he and the doctor started West the next day. “Might as well get this thing settled,” he said. “You and I have got to be on harmonious terms with the stock-holders. Besides, there’s an early grave yawning for me if I don’t succeed in making peace with Mrs. Tucker. I tell you, Doctor, when a woman decides to make things uncomfortable for a man,—well, the man might just as well resign himself to being perpetually uncomfortable.” And yet, no one could have greeted them more graciously than did Mrs. Tucker.