"Trouble with Potter Waite," said Tom Watts, "is that he just naturally don't give a damn. If he's going to pull something he'd as lief pull it in the middle of Woodward Avenue at noon by the village clock as to pull it on the Six Mile Road at midnight." "No pussy-footin' for him," said Jack Eldredge. "My old man was talking about him the other night. Day after he cleaned up those two taxi-drivers out here in front. 'Don't let me hear of you running around with that young Waite,' he says. 'He's a bad actor. You keep off him.'" "He's a life-saver," Fred La Mothe joined in. "When dad lights into me I just mention Potter, and dad forgets me entirely. You ought to hear dad when he really gets to going on Potter." "I'm no Sunday-school boy--" said Brick O'Mera. "Do tell," gibed Eldredge. "--but I'll say Potter is crowdin' the mourners. _I_ wouldn't follow his trail a week steady." The others waggled their heads acquiescently. Even to their minds Potter Waite traveled at too high speed and with too little thought of public opinion. About that table sat five young men who were as much a result of a condition as outlying subdivisions are the result of a local boom. Of them all, La Mothe came from a family which had known moderate wealth for generations, but it had grown swiftly, unbelievably, during the past few wonderful years, to a great fortune. Of the rest, Kraemer and O'Mera were the sons of machinists who, a dozen years before, would have considered carefully before giving their sons fifteen cents to sit in the gallery at the old Whitney Opera House to see sawmill and pile-driver and fire-engine drama. The automobile had caught them up and poured millions into their laps. Eldredge was the son of a bookkeeper who, fifteen years ago, had drawn fifty dollars at the end of each month for his services. For every dollar of that monthly salary he could now show a million. Watts was the son of a lawyer whom sheer good luck had lifted from a practice consisting of the collection of small debts, and made a stockholder in and adviser to a gigantic automobile concern. And these boys were the sons of those swiftly gotten millions. They had forgotten the old days, just as Detroit, their home city, had forgotten its old drowsiness, its mid-Western quietness and conservatism.