no possible difference. I shall have to face the music in the end; we shall all three have to face it, more is the pity. If there were the slenderest chance of escape——”

The interruption, voices in the adjoining banking[30] room, gruff tones raised emphatically, and Winkle’s more moderate ones parroting excuses and explanations came over the half-height partition of the rear office. It culminated now in an abrupt opening of the door of privacy. The intruder, whom Winkle had apparently been trying to bar out, was a big man with a clean-shaven face in which each feature seemed to have been massively exaggerated to make it harmonize with the gigantic figure; a great Roman beak of a nose; a hard-bitted mouth buttressed by a jaw over which the heavy cheeks hung like the dewlaps of a bulldog; strong teeth clamping the blackest of cigars; shrewd eyes that glared from beneath penthouse brows; in short, a man who, in the Stone Age, would have acquired the most commodious of the caves and swung the heaviest of the clubs.

[30]

“Adam—you old snipe!” was the giant’s explosive greeting, and his hand-grip fairly lifted the slighter man out of his chair. “Nice kind of a welcome your watch-dog cashier out there was trying to hand me: said you were busy and couldn’t be interrupted! How are you, David, boy”—and now it came David’s turn to wince under the vigorous hand-grasp; at least, until he could summon his athletic training and do a little bone crushing on his own account.

[31]Adam Vallory, sunk fathoms deep in the pool of despair but a moment before, made a generous effort to rise to the hospitable requirements.

[31]

“You took us completely unawares, Eben; I didn’t dream you were anywhere within a day’s journey of old Middleboro. And Winkle’s eyesight must be getting bad if he didn’t recognize you. Sit down, if you can find a chair big enough to hold you. It’s a pleasure to see your face again; you don’t give me the chance any too often. Now tell us what good wind has blown you back to Middleboro.”

The big man seated himself, and the chair, though it was the stoutest one in the room, whined its protest.

“Business, Adam; always business. We have an order in with your two-by-four equipment factory here for a lot of scrapes and dump-cars, and at the last minute Judson wired that he couldn’t deliver on time. I didn’t happen to have anybody to send, so I came down here to read the 

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