e old place?"

"Well----" Adams paused, then coughed, and said slowly, "Fact is,
Charley Lohr, I been thinking likely I wouldn't come back."

"What! What you talkin' about?"

"No," said Adams. "I been thinking I might likely kind of branch out on
my own account."

"Well, I'll be doggoned!" Old Charley Lohr was amazed; he ruffled up
his gray moustache with thumb and forefinger, leaving his mouth open
beneath, like a dark cave under a tangled wintry thicket. "Why, that's
the doggonedest thing I ever heard!" he said. "I already am the oldest
inhabitant down there, but if you go, there won't be anybody else of the
old generation at all. What on earth you thinkin' of goin' into?"

"Well," said Adams, "I rather you didn't mention it till I get started
of course anybody'll know what it is by then--but I HAVE been kind of
planning to put a liquid glue on the market."

His friend, still ruffling the gray moustache upward, stared at him in
frowning perplexity. "Glue?" he said. "GLUE!"

"Yes. I been sort of milling over the idea of taking up something like
that."

"Handlin' it for some firm, you mean?"

"No. Making it. Sort of a glue-works likely."

Lohr continued to frown. "Let me think," he said. "Didn't the ole man
have some such idea once, himself?"

Adams leaned forward, rubbing his knees; and he coughed again before he
spoke. "Well, yes. Fact is, he did. That is to say, a mighty long while
ago he did."

"I remember," said Lohr. "He never said anything about it that I know
of; but seems to me I recollect we had sort of a rumour around the place
how you and that man--le's see, wasn't his name Campbell, that died of
typhoid fever? Yes, that was it, Campbell. Didn't the ole man have you
and Campbell workin' sort of private on some glue proposition or other?"

"Yes, he did." Adams nodded. "I found out a good deal about glue then,
too."

"Been workin' on it since, I suppose?"

"Yes. Kept it in my mind and studied out new things about it."

Lohr looked serious. "Well, but see here," he said. "I hope it ain't
anything the ole man'll think might infringe on whatever he had you
doin' for HIM. You know how he is: broad-minded, liberal, free-handed
man as walks this earth, and if he thought he owed you a cent he'd sell
his right hand for a pork-chop to pay it, if that was the only way; but
if he got the idea anybody was tryin' to get the better of him, he'd
sell BOTH his hands, if he had to, to keep 'em from doin' it