ason to apply. It is one thing to trust a man implicitly, and another
thing entirely to try to tell him so. For silence is most golden in the
specification of friendship, and when employed in the particularizing of
intimate emotion the silver of speech is apt to turn to veriest tinsel.

Yet the occasion was one which demanded speech. Moreover, and in direct
opposition to his inclinations and the precedents he had established, he
was forced not only to give practical expression to his feeling for
Broadcastle and Barclay, but, what humiliated as well as annoyed him, to
confess himself incapable of dealing with a question which confronted
him. It was the first time within his recollection when he had
mistrusted his own judgment.

But Peter Rathbawne was not the man to procrastinate, and presently he
began to speak, in a low but curiously intense voice, from which the
others instinctively took their cue. He was a short man, inclined to
stoutness, but with the clear, sharp eye and the underhang of jaw which
tell of right principle and indomitable perseverance. It was a question
whether in calling him the second most obstinate man in Alleghenia,
Governor Abbott had given him the full measure of his due.

"Gentlemen," he said, with the somewhat stilted formality which was part
of his manner, "I will say to you what I wouldn't say to others,--I'm in
a hole, and I want your advice. I'll be as brief as possible, and I'll
come right to the point. For thirty years I've been building up the
Rathbawne Mills, giving them every hour of my thought, every particle of
my strength, every atom of my ability. I've seen them grow from a little
shanty on the outskirts of Kenton City to a collection of buildings
covering four solid squares, filled with modern machinery, and employing
four thousand, two hundred and odd hands. I've been a business man, I've
been a rigid man, but I've been a fair man, too. No one can say that I
ever clipped wages, even when I had to run the mills at a loss, as I've
had to do more than once. I gave my people an eight-hour day long before
the law of Alleghenia jammed it down the throats of other mill-owners.
I swallowed the Union, though it was a bitter mouthful. There has never
been a just complaint from one of my employees that wasn't attended to
in short order, if it was in my power to do so. There's many an old
fossil on my pay-rolls to-day who isn't worth his salt, but he stays
there, and will continue to stay