ow. Tom signaled his Irishman.

"Get me over to the Elevated, and then go to Madison Square and wait for
me," he ordered; and by this change of conveyance he obtained his mail
and won back to the Fifth Avenue Hotel by late breakfast time.

From that on, luck was with him. The Farleys, father and son, were in
the lobby of the hotel, waiting for the others to come down to the cafe
breakfast. Tom saw them, confronted them, and went at things very
concisely.

"I have come all the way from Boston to ask for a few minutes of your
time, Mr. Farley," he said to the president. "Will you give it to me
now?"

"Surely!" was the genial reply, and the promoter signed to his son and
drew apart with the importunate one. "Well, go on, my boy; what can I do
for you at this last American moment?--some message from your good
father?"

"No," said Tom shortly; "it's from me, individually. You know in what
shape you have left things at home; they've got to be stood on their
feet before you go aboard the _Baltic_."

"What's this--what's this? Why, my dear young man! what can you possibly
mean?"--this in buttered tones of the gentlest expostulation.

"I mean just about what I say. You have smashed Chiawassee Consolidated,
and now you are going off to leave my father to hold the bag. Or rather
I should say, you are taking the bag with you."

The president was visibly moved.

"Why, Thomas--you must be losing your mind! You've--you've been studying
too hard; that's it--the term work up there in Boston has been too much
for you."

"Cut it out, Mr. Farley," said Tom savagely, all the Gordon fighting
blood singing in his veins. "You've got a thing to do, and it is going
to be done before you leave America. Will you talk straight business, or
not?"

The president adjusted his eye-glasses, and gave this brand-new Gordon a
calm over-look.

"And if I decline to discuss business matters with a rude school-boy?"
he intimated mildly.

"Then it will be rather the worse for you," was the defiant rejoinder.
"Acting for my father and the minority stock-holders, I shall try to
have you and your son held in America, pending an expert examination of
the company's affairs."

It was a long shot, with a thousand chances of missing. If there was
anything criminal in the Farley administration, the evidences were
doubtless well buried. But Tom was looking deep into the shifty blue
eyes of his antagonist when he fired, and he saw that he had not wholly