I may fill a little of the interim perhaps by telling you what I had passed over in the busy silence of the last two or three years, that Fred Salmon has attempted to make _amende honorable_. Fred Salmon, who was the means of my losing all of the meager capital you should have lived upon in your old age, has reappeared with a commendable attempt at restitution. Begoggled and be-linen-dustered, he drove up to the châlet some ten months ago in a magnificently shining car of bizarre design and he entered my door booming like not too distant thunder. "Hello, Ranny!" he shouted out, and in a twinkling my study seemed to be brimming with him, inundated by him, overflowing with Fred and his Salmonism. "Have a cigar, my boy—how are you?—how is the family?—how is the book business?" "Which am I to answer first?" I grinned mildly. "Never mind!" roared Fred. "I see you’re all right. Ask me how’s tricks with me?" He was so obviously bursting with news that I complied at once. "Very well—how are your tricks, Fred?" "Booming, booming, Randolph, my boy—and kiting! Jack Morgan himself wouldn’t blush to be in what I’ve got into! Put that on your piano, Randolph, my boy!" Fred is one of those who likes to talk of Jack Morgan, Harry Davison, Gene Meyer and Barney Baruch, as though they were his daily cocktail companions. This distant familiarity of moneyed men gives him a strange exuberance. "Consider that I have tried it on my piano and like the prelude," I told him. "Now for the rest of the opus." "O-puss! Oh, fudge!" he laughed. "Gosh! You’re a great old bird, Rannie—great old bird! Well, listen here, fellah—" he ran on, wild horses could not have held him—"you think I like to brag, don’t you? Don’t deny it—you know you do! Well, it’s God’s truth, Randolph, I do. Some folks are like that—me, for instance. But I had nothing to brag about, see? So I made up my mind I’d get into something so good it could stand any amount of bragging. So what do I do, but go into oil—oil, Randolph, my lad—and now I’ve got it—I’ve got it! Rich? Say, I’m going to be filthy with it, Randolph, positively oozing, crawling with money. That’s how it’s with me, boy!" "Congratulations!" I held out my hand. He gripped it hard. "And what do you do with your millions?" I added blandly. "Oh, I ain’t got ’em yet!" he shouted. "But they’re coming, Randolph—they’re on the way, on the way! I hear the sound of their dear little golden feet right now—sweetest sound you ever heard. And that reminds me!—" And on a sudden he opened his duster and from his bosom pocket brought forth a number of dazzling yellow certificates with gorgeous blood red seals upon them.