ckley had induced some country dealers who owned a line of local
grain-houses to remove to Lattimore and put up a huge terminal elevator
for the handling of their trade. Captain Tolliver had been for a long
time working upon a project for developing a great water-power, by
tunneling across a bend in the river, and utilizing the fall. The
building of the elevator attracted the attention of a company of
Rochester millers, and almost before we knew it their forces had been
added to ours, and the tunnel was begun, with the certainty that a
two-thousand-barrel mill would be ready to grind the wheat from the
elevator as soon as the flume began carrying water. This tunnel cut
through an isthmus between the Brushy Creek valley and the river, and
brought to bear on our turbines the head from a ten-mile loop of shoals
and riffles. It opened into the gorge near the southern edge of Lynhurst
Park, and crossed the Trescott farm. So it was that Bill awoke one day
to the fact that his farm was coveted by divers people, who saw in his
fields and feed-yards desirable sites for railway tracks, mills,
factories, and the cottages of a manufacturing suburb. This it was that
had put the Captain, like a blood-hound, on his trial, to the end that
he was run to earth in my office, and made his appeal for help in
managing Josie.

"There she comes now," said he. "Labor with her, won't yeh?"

"Bring her with us to the hotel," said I, "to take dinner. If my wife
and Elkins can't fix the thing, no one can."

So we five dined together, and after dinner discussed the Trescott
crisis. Bill put the case, with all a veteran dealer's logic, in its
financial aspects.

"But we don't want to be rich," said Josie.

"What've we ben actin' all these years like we have for, then?" inquired
Bill. "Seem's if I'd been lab'rin' under a mistake f'r some time past.
When your ma an' me was a-roughin' it out there in the old log-house,
an' she a-lookin' out at the Feb'uary stars through the holes in the
roof, a-holdin' you, a little baby in bed, we reckoned we was a-doin' of
it to sort o' better ourselves in a property way. Wouldn't you
'a'thought so, Jim?"

"Well," said Mr. Elkins, with an air of judicial perpension, "if you had
asked me about it, I should have said that, if you wanted to stay poor,
you could have held your own better by staying in Pleasant Valley
Township as a renter. This was no place to come to if you wanted to
conserve your poverty."

"But