swer is that Steve's
father and Tom's father were in the same line of trade, wholesale
lumber, and had a few years before fallen out over some business matter.
Since that time the two men had been at daggers drawn during office
hours and only coldly civil at other times. Steve was forbidden to set
foot in Tom's house and Tom was as strictly prohibited from entering
Steve's. Had the fathers had their way at the beginning of the quarrel
the boys would have ceased then and there to have anything to do with
each other. But they had been close friends ever since primary school
days and, while they reluctantly respected the dictum as to visiting at
each other's residences, they had firmly refused to give up the
friendship, and their fathers had finally been forced to sanction what
they could not prevent.

At the time this story opens, the quarrel between the two men, each a
prominent and well-to-do member of the community, still continued, but
its edge had been dulled by time. Both Mr. Edwards and Mr. Hall took
active parts in municipal affairs and so were forced to meet often and
to even serve together on various committees. They almost invariably
took opposite sides on every question, but they did not allow their
personal quarrel to interfere with their public duties.

The boys had at first found the condition of affairs very irksome, but
had eventually got used to it. It was hard not to be able to run in and
out of each other's houses as they had done when they had first known
each other, but there were plenty of opportunities to be together away
from home and they made the most of them and were well-nigh inseparable.
Mr. Edwards had declared, when announcing the fact in the preceding
spring, that Steve was to go to boarding school, that he was sending the
boy away to remove him from the questionable association of Tom Hall.
But Steve gave little credence to that statement, for he knew that
secretly his father thought very well of Tom. The real reason was that
Steve had not been making good progress at high school, owing
principally to the fact that he gave too much time to athletics and not
enough to study. Mr. Edwards concluded that at a boarding school Steve
would be under a stricter discipline and would profit by it. Steve's
mother had died many years before, and his father, while perfectly able
to command a large army of employees, was rather helpless when it came
to exercising a proper authority over one sixteen-yea