find him to-night, and see that you don't open your head about this
business to anyone else."

"I get you," says I, doin' the West Point salute. "It's me to trail and
shut up Tuttle. He'll be here, if I have to bring him in an ambulance."

That's why I jumps out before closin' time and mingles with the Jersey
commuters in a lovely hot ride across the meadows. It's a scrubby
station where I gets off, too; one of these fact'ry settlements where
the whole population answers the seven o'clock whistle every mornin'.
There's a brick barracks half a mile long, where they make sewin'
machines or something, and snuggled close up around it is hundreds of
these four-fam'ly wooden tenements, gettin' the full benefit of the soft
coal smoke and makin' it easy for the hands to pike home for a noon
dinner. Say, you talk about the East Side double deckers; but they're
brownstone fronts compared to some of these corporation shacks across
the meadows!

Seventeen dirty kids led me to the number Tuttle gave me, and in the
right hand first floor kitchen I finds a red faced woman in a faded blue
wrapper fryin' salt pork and cabbage.

"Mrs. Tinkham Tuttle?" says I, holdin' my breath.

"No," says she, glancin' suspicious over her shoulder. "I'm his sister."

"Oh!" says I. "Is Tink around?"

"I don't know whether he is or not, and don't care!" says she.

"Much obliged," says I; "but I ain't come to collect for anything.
Couldn't you give a guess?"

"If I did," says she, "I'd say he was over to the factory yard. That's
where he stays most of the time."

It's half-past five; but the fact'ry's runnin' full blast, and I has to
jolly a timekeeper and the yard boss before I locates my man. Fin'lly,
though, they point out a big storage shed in one corner of the coal
cinder desert they has fenced in so careful. The wide double doors to
the shed are shut; but after I've hammered for a while one of 'em is
slid back a few inches and Tuttle peeks out.

"Oh!" he gasps. "You! Say, are they going to take it? Are they?"

"Them's the indications," says I, "providin' it's all O. K. and your
price is right."

"Oh, I'll make the price low enough," says he. "I'll sell out for two
thousand, and it ought to be worth twice that. But two is all I need."

"Eh?" says I. "What kind of finance do you call that? Say, Tuttle, you
know you can't work any 'phony deal on the Corrugated. Better give me
the straight goods and save trouble."

"I will," says he. "