The old gentleman didn't like newspapers. But he waived that aside with a frown. "The facts!" he whispered across the table. "I should not have mentioned it had it not been for a conversation which I had the other day in New York with Judge Sloan, of the Chicago bar. He tells me that it is generally believed to be true that this Garretson was bribed, and that my old friend Jeff Slocum was mixed up in it. He says that Slocum has lost his reputation among the best men of the profession on account of his connection with this scandal. What are the facts?" "This is hardly the place to go into all that," I replied somewhat tartly. "I don't know but that the place is good enough," the banker observed dryly, "provided you have the right things to say." But he took the frost out of his severe tone by one of his most genial smiles, and added more gently:-- "Perhaps you young men don't realize how serious it is to have such rumors get around about your reputation. Why, my boy, it puts you in another class! You are no longer gentlemen, who can be trusted with honest people's money and confidence." Farson would be a hard man to bring to my point of view! I said by way of allegory:-- "When a man comes out of the alley and puts a pistol in your face, and asks for all the money you have on you, you don't wait to see where you hit him, do you? We don't here in Chicago. The men who are making all this talk were the hold-ups, and they did not get our money." I laughed. [Illustration: "_When a man comes out of the alley and puts a pistol in your face, and asks for all the money you have on you, you don't wait to see where you hit him, do you?_"] But he did not laugh with me--instead, he shut up like a clam all at once. He finished his corned beef hash and tea, making a few remarks about the train service on the road he had come over. I asked him some questions about our railroad matters, but he merely mumbled "Um, um" to all I had to say. Finally he said with his usual calm courtesy that he had some letters to write, and as the train for the West he was to take did not leave for some time he would not detain me, but would go upstairs to the waiting-room and write his letters. So he seized his worn old grip and marched off. "Cursed old Maine Yankee," I said to myself, and I repeated the remark over the telephone to Slocum, telling him the result of my luncheon with the banker. "Maybe so," the lawyer telephoned back. "But we can't afford to let him get his back up." "It's up already--he's been talking with Sloan, and I gather the judge didn't speak highly of you or me." "I suppose not," came the answer over the wire, and Slocum's voice sounded dreary. "That kind of thing dies hard." It _was_ dying hard, and no doubt about it! CHAPTER XXI A SQUEEZE