"You're discovered, old fox!" cried Terry; "and the outraged dignity of the law demands a drink." They plied him with half-facetious, half-envious congratulations. But Neil would have none of them. "Not my scheme," he growled. "Entirely Keith's. I'm a sleeping partner only. He engineered it all, thought of it all, dragged me in." "You must have made a good thing out of it, Mr. Neil," suggested Palmer respectfully. The formidable old man eyed the speaker grumpily for a moment. "About a quarter million, cool, between us," he vouchsafed finally. He was, for some reason, willing to brag a bit. This statement was received in admiring silence by all but Terry. Everybody but that devil-may-care and lawless pillar of the law was afraid of Neil. But Terry would joke with anybody. "I hope you're going to let him have a little of it, Neil," he laughed. The old man shifted his eyes from Palmer to Terry with much the air of restraining heavy guns. Terry met the impact untroubled. "Judge," grunted the financier at last, "that young man will get his due share. He has tied me up in a contract that even your honoured court would find difficulty in breaking." With this parting shot he arose and stumped out. "If Malcolm Neil acknowledges he is tied up," observed Terry, who had not been in the slightest degree disturbed, "he is certainly tied up!" "Consider the man who tied him," begged Colonel Baker. "He must, in the language of the poets, be a lallapaloozer." "He's worth getting hold of," said Dick Blatchford. Therefore, when, a little later, Keith appeared, he was hailed jovially, and invited to drink. Everybody was very cordial. Within five minutes he was hail fellow with them all, joking with the most august of them on terms of equality. Judge Terry, in whose court he had stood abashed, plied him with cocktails; Colonel Baker told several stories, one of which was new; Sam Brannan, with the mixture of coarseness, overbearing manners, and fascination that made him personally attractive to men and some women, called him "my boy"; and the rest of the party had whole-heartedly taken him in and were treating him as one of themselves. Keith had known all these men, of course, but they had been several cuts above him in importance, and his relations with most of them had been formal. His whole being glowed and expanded. After the first cocktail or two, and after a little of this grateful petting, he had some difficulty in keeping himself from getting too expansive, in holding himself down to becoming modesty, in not talking too much. He quite realized the meaning of this sudden cordiality; but he welcomed it as another endorsement, from the highest, most unimpeachable sources, of his cleverness and legal acumen. They drank and talked until twilight. Then Keith began to make his excuses. They shouted him down. "You're going to dinner with us, my son," stated Brannan. "They've opened an oyster palace down the street, and we're going to sample it."