on?"

"I ain't agoing a step," William told them both; "I'm going to stop right
here with Uncle Gordon."

"Well, then," the latter insisted, "get it through with--what is it?"

"I'll tell you what it is," William Vibard stammered; "it's a hundred and
forty dollars Rose held out on you and kept in a drawer, that's what!"

Rose's emotion changed to a crimson consternation.

"Why, William Vibard! what an awful thing to say. What little money I had
put by was saved from years. What a thing to say about me and Uncle
Gordon."

"'Tain't no such thing you saved it; you held it out on him, dollars at a
time. You didn't have no more right to it than I did."

Gordon's gaze centered keenly upon his niece's hot face. She endeavored to
sustain, refute, the accusation successfully; but her valor wavered,
broke. She disappeared abruptly. He surveyed Vibard without pleasure.

"You're a ramshackle contraption," he observed crisply.

"I got as good a right to it as her," the other repeated.

"A hundred and forty dollars," Gordon said bitterly; "that's a small
business. Well, where is it? Have you got it?"

"No, I ain't," William exploded.

"Well--?"

"You can't never tell what might happen," the young man observed
enigmatically; "the bellowses wear out dreadful quick, the keys work loose
like, and then they might stop making them. It's the best one on the
market."

"What scrabble's this? What did you do with the money?"

"They're in the stable," William Vibard answered more obscurely than
before. "With good treatment they ought to last a life. They come cheaper
too like that."

Gordon relinquished all hope of extracting any meaning from the other's
elliptical speech. He rose. "If 'they're' in the stable," he announced,
"I'll soon have some sense out of you." He procured a lantern, and tramped
shortly to the stable, closely followed by Rose's husband.

"Now!" he exclaimed, loosening the hasp of the door, throwing it open.

The former entered and bent over a heap in an obscure corner. When he rose
the lantern shone on two orderly piles of glossy black paper boxes. Gordon
strode across the contracted space and wrenched off a lid.... Within
reposed a brand new accordion. There were nine others.

"You see," William eagerly interposed; "now I'm fixed good."

At the sight of the grotesque waste a swift resentment moved Gordon
Makimmon--it was a mockery of his money's use, a gibing at his capability,
his planning. The pett