His visitor nodded, then smiled a rather dry smile. "It might, however, eventually mean more old men shot in the back," he said. Then rising, "Well, I've enjoyed our talk and thanks for helping me out with this scheme of the ransoming of Terence, by that young crowd. It is funny, but it is significant, and they mean business. They will pay a certain sum per head into your hands Saturday nights, and it goes into the O'Brien fund." The lawyer hesitated, adding in a low voice, "I need not tell you that I cannot save the chap. I know that he did the thing, but I mean to try and get a shorter sentence, twenty years perhaps," he shrugged his shoulders, adding, "and you and I know precisely what a man's life is worth after twenty years in prison." "How about a game of golf on the Wedgewood course to-morrow? You want to get your revenge?" They shook hands on it; the younger man looked into the dark eyes, so full of human kindness, yet so austere and lonely. "Watts Shipman," the young cashier said slowly, "what are you doing up there on that mountain? Anything you shouldn't--home brew,--sirens?" The lawyer laughed; he caught up his riding crop. "Come up and see; walk up, do you good to climb that far; no wine, no women, not even some of our best suppressed literature. I'm--I'm just trying," the lawyer threw back his head and drew a deep breath, "to get hold of life, real life, the kind of thing that eludes men until too late they turn and clutch for it." The other laughed. "And so you saw wood and wash your own dishes? Wonderful realization of life!" Shipman's mouth twisted into appreciation of the thing. "I've got a vegetable garden--raise nearly all my own produce. I've planted it in terraces half down the mountainside the way the Greeks do in Thessaly. That's a wonderful scheme for natural irrigation. Anyway," the lawyer squared away and delivered a teasing punch on his friend's chest, "I've got back a good digestion and can stretch like a tiger and feel the morning sun along my bare flanks and--and I can laugh heartily, and I've forgotten the smell of money and I've gone back to a boyish repugnance for dirty things and lying things and under-handed things." The older man cast a penetrating look into the very stuff of his friend. "Isn't it up to us to create new standards?" he asked squarely; "are you satisfied with the old? I'm not! I want clean standards, but I want 'em built on facts, not on calendar mottoes."