adjunct to a not particularly brilliant academic degree. And in the midst of it had come the cablegram summoning him home, where he arrived a scant twenty-four hours before his father’s death.

And now, William Kent having been laid to rest on the sunny slope where the great, plumed elms whispered messages with every summer breeze to the dead below them, his son was called to con the business ship through unknown waters, without any knowledge of navigation or even of ordinary seamanship.

The letters which he scanned, reading the words but not getting the sense because he had not the remotest idea of what they were about, were for the most part exceedingly terse and business-like. They were the morning cream of the correspondence, skimmed from the mass by the practised hand of Wright, the manager; letters which, in the ordinary course of business, go direct to the head of the house to be passed upon.

But in this case the head of the house had rather vaguer ideas than his office boy as to how they should be handled. They dealt with timber berths, with logs, with lumber, with contracts made and to be made; in fact with almost everything that Joe Kent knew nothing about and with nothing that he knew anything about. And so, in utter despair, he was on the point of summoning Wright to elucidate matters when, after an emphatic rap, the door opened, admitting a burly, red-faced man of fifty.

This was Locke. He had the appearance of a prosperous farmer, and he was an exceedingly busy lawyer, with the reputation of a relentless fighter when once he took a case. He had been William Kent’s friend as well as his legal adviser.

“Well, Joe,” said he, “getting into harness already?”

“I can get into it easy enough,” Joe replied; “but it’s a lot too big for me.”

Locke nodded. “You’ll grow. When I started I didn’t know any more about law than you do about logs. You got that letter?”

“Yes, thanks. He said I might tie to you and Crooks.”

Locke looked out of the window because his eyes were filling. To disguise the fact he pretended to search his pockets for a cigar and growled:

“So you may, within limits. Got a smoke there? I’m out.” He lit one of William Kent’s big, black cigars, leaned back in his chair, and crossed one leg over the other. “Now, then, Joe, where shall we start?” he asked. “I’m busy, and you 

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