“Well, no; but they kind o’ faded away like. I wouldn’t exactly say they were put out, but after a while they didn’t seem to be able to stay in. But never mind them. Well, Cadmus was a bad location. The iron fields around there had pretty well petered out, and we were way off the main line of transportation. Business was fair enough; we made a straight ten per cent, year in and year out, because the thing was managed carefully; but that was in spite of a lot of drawbacks. So I got a scheme in my head to move the whole concern up here to Thessaly, and hitch it up with the Minster iron-works. We could save one dollar a ton, or forty-five thousand dollars in all, in the mere matter of freight alone, if we could use up their entire output. I may tell you, I didn’t appear in the business at all. I daresay Mrs. Minster don’t know to this day that I’m a kind of partner of hers. It happened that Wendover used to know her when she was a girl--they both come from down the Hudson somewhere--and so he worked the thing with her, and we moved over from Cadmus, hook, line, bob, and sinker, and we’re the Thessaly Manufacturing Company. Do you see?” “So far, yes. She and her daughters have one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars cash in it. What is the rest of the company like?” “It’s stocked at four hundred thousand dollars. We put in all our plant and machinery and business and good-will and so on at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and then we furnished seventy-five thousand dollars cash. So we hold two hundred and twenty-five shares to their one hundred and seventy-five.” “Who are the ‘we’?” “Well, Pete Wendover and me are about the only people you’re liable to meet around the premises, I guess. There are some other names on the books, but they don’t amount to much. We can wipe them off whenever we like.” “I notice that this company has paid no dividends since it was formed.” “That’s because of the expense of building. And we ain’t got what you may call fairly to work yet. But it’s all right. There is big money in it.” “I daresay,” observed Horace. “But, if you will excuse the remark, I seem to have missed that part of your statement which referred to _my_ making something out of the company.” The hardware merchant allowed his cold eyes to twinkle for an instant. “You’ll be taken care of,” he said, confidentially. “Don’t fret your gizzard about _that!_” Horace smiled. It seemed to be easier to get on with Tenney than he had thought. “But what am I to do; that is, if I decide to do anything?” he asked. “I confess I don’t see your scheme.” “Why, that’s curious,” said the other, with an air of candor. “And you lawyers have the name of being so ’cute, too!” “I don’t suppose we see through a stone wall much farther than other people. Our chief advantage is in being able to recognize that it is a wall. And this one of yours seems to be as thick and opaque as most, I’m bound to say.”