When the conversation got around to the business again, Billy told me that Goucher--a Missourian that the Pruntys had injected into the business, and who was perfectly slavish in his subserviency to Enos--had been quizzing around Billy, trying to find out what ailed Pa, and if it was anything serious. "I didn't like the little emissary," said Billy, "and so I told him that Mr. Blunt was precariously ill, with a complication of Bright's disease in its tertiary stage, and locomotor ataxia. He wrote down the Bright's disease and asked me how to spell the other. I told him that the Bright's disease would probably terminate fatally before he could master so much orthography; and still he didn't tumble! Goucher went away conscious of having performed well an important piece of work. I can't help thinking now that this incident has more significance than I then supposed." He sat puckering up his brows for a long time, and I let him pucker. At last he said: "Dolly, I shouldn't a bit wonder if they are trying to take some advantage of a dying man. I can see how they work the problem out. 'Here is a sick man,' they say, 'who has been doing the work of half a dozen for twenty years. He is going to pieces physically. If he has some fatal disease, and knows it, we can settle with him, and make him pay a few hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of getting his daughter's inheritance disentangled from a business which she can't run, and in which she will be at the mercy of--of people with whom her relations are a little strained. But first, we'll find out just how sick he is, and whether he's likely to get well soon, or at all.' And so they send Goucher mousing about; and he reports Bright's disease, and something else he can't spell, and they make an appointment with Helmerston for to-morrow morning to find out more about it, Mr. Goucher not being very clear. And your father's rather fierce manner of hiding what his ailment really is makes them all the more suspicious." "You tell them," said I, firing up, "that Pa is still able--" But I saw that Billy had one of those epoch-making ideas which mark the crises of history, and I stopped spellbound. He finally struck himself a fearful blow upon the knee, and said that he had it, and one looking at him could easily believe it. Then he explained to me his plan for discomfiting the Pruntys and hoisting them by their own petard. This is deeply psychological, being based upon an intuitive perception of what a Prunty would do when he believed certain things and had money at stake.