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Virgil, I couldn't exactly let you walk off with it like swallering a pat o' butter, now, could I? It didn't look exactly reasonable to expect me to let go like that, now, did it?" Adams found a half-choked voice somewhere in his throat. "Do you--would you step into my office a minute, Mr. Lamb?" "Why, certainly I'm willing to have a little talk with you," the old gentleman said, as he followed his former employee indoors, and he added, "I feel a lot more like it than I did before I got THAT up, over yonder, Virgil!" Adams threw open the door of the rough room he called his office, having as justification for this title little more than the fact that he had a telephone there and a deal table that served as a desk. "Just step into the office, please," he said. Lamb glanced at the desk, at the kitchen chair before it, at the telephone, and at the partition walls built of old boards, some covered with ancient paint and some merely weatherbeaten, the salvage of a house-wrecker; and he smiled broadly. "So these are your offices, are they?" he asked. "You expect to do quite a business here, I guess, don't you, Virgil?" Adams turned upon him a stricken and tortured face. "Have you seen Charley Lohr since last night, Mr. Lamb?" "No; I haven't seen Charley." "Well, I told him to tell you," Adams began;--"I told him I'd pay you----" "Pay me what you expect to make out o' glue, you mean, Virgil?" "No," Adams said, swallowing. "I mean what my boy owes you. That's what I told Charley to tell you. I told him to tell you I'd pay you every last----" "Well, well!" the old gentleman interrupted, testily. "I don't know anything about that." "I'm expecting to pay you," Adams went on, swallowing again, painfully. "I was expecting to do it out of a loan I thought I could get on my glue-works." The old gentleman lifted his frosted eyebrows. "Oh, out o' the GLUE-works? You expected to raise money on the glue-works, did you?" At that, Adams's agitation increased prodigiously. "How'd you THINK I expected to pay you?" he said. "Did you think I expected to get money on my own old bones?" He slapped himself harshly upon the chest and legs. "Do you think a bank'll lend money on a man's ribs and his broken-down old knee-bones? They won't do it! You got to have some BUSINESS prospects to show 'em, if you haven't got any property nor securities; and what business prospects have I got now, with that sign of yours up over
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