The purchasing agent picked up his morning cigar, rolled it around in his mouth, and puffed before he replied:-- "I don't mind telling you that it means something to me to have Climax used at Eversley. It's just as good as any cement on the market. I give you my word for that. I take it you're a good friend of mine. I wish you would see if you can't use the Climax." Then they talked of other matters. When Hart got back to the office he looked up the Climax cement in a trade catalogue. There were hundreds of brands on the market, and the Climax was one of the newest. Horace Bushfield, he reflected, was Colonel Raymond's son-in-law. If he wished to do the Popover station, he should remain on good terms with the purchasing agent of the road. Some time that day he got out the type-written specifications for the railroad work, and in the section on the cement work he inserted neatly in ink the words, "Or a cement of equal quality approved by the architect." He had scarcely time to digest this when not many days later the purchasing agent telephoned to him:-- "Say, Hart, the Buckeye Hardware people have just had a man in here seeing me about the hardware for that building. I see you have specified the Forrest makes. Aren't the Buckeye people first-class?" The architect, who knew what was coming this time, waited a moment before replying. Then he answered coolly, "I think they are, Bushfield." "Well, the Buckeye people have always done our business, and they couldn't understand why they were shut out by your specifying the Forrest makes. You'll make that all right? So long." As Hart hung up his receiver, he would have liked to write Raymond, the general manager, that he wanted nothing more to do with the railroad business. Some weeks later when he happened to glance over the Buckeye Company's memoranda of sales for the Eversley station, and saw what the railroad had paid for its hardware, he knew that Horace Bushfield was a thief. But the purchasing agent was Colonel Raymond's son-in-law, and the railroad was about to start the Popover station! Something similar had been his experience with the contractor Graves. "Put me up a good, showy building," the contractor had said, when they first discussed the design. "That's the kind that will take in that park neighborhood. People nowadays want a stylish home with elevator boys in uniform.... That court you've got there between the wings, and the little fountain, and the grand entrance,--all just right. But they don't want to pay nothin' for their style. Flats don't rent for anything near what they do in New York. Out here they want the earth for fifty, sixty dollars a month; and we've got to give 'em the nearest thing to it for their money."