actices.

These apprehensions were shared by the only two friends whom Nat Lawson
had admitted fully to his confidence--President Benjamin Wade, of the
Canadian Lake Shores Railway, and McAllister, the keen-eyed editor of
the _Recorder_, which of all the city newspapers was the most
consistently independent in politics. Wade was an old friend of long
standing, himself holder of a small block of stock in the
Interprovincial Loan & Savings Company, and it was to him that Lawson
had turned for advice in his extremity. Immediately Wade had called
into counsel the chief of his railroad's very competent detective
staff, Bob Cranston, and thereupon began a series of quiet
investigations with the object of obtaining the necessary evidence to
depose the Nickleby faction from control of Interprovincial affairs.

Although equally anxious to help, McAllister had no part in Wade's
plans; he preferred to work along special lines of his own. He and
Wade differed in their theories of the situation, and much to Nat
Lawson's amusement they had argued with some heat the first night that
they happened to meet at the Lawson home; so that the two were somewhat
in friendly rivalry, each anxious to prove that he was right, and each
determined to play a lone hand.

It may have been his interest in the case that led McAllister to call
so frequently of late at the old-fashioned brick house that stood back
from the street, surrounded by spacious grounds and a wealth of
carefully tended shrubbery, in the older residential section of the
city. No doubt it was this that made him stop for a smoke with the
former president of the Interprovincial about three evenings a week on
the way to his office in the brightly-lighted _Recorder_ building,
where hummed activity during the hours that others slept, in order that
the public might have a morning newspaper to prop against the
sugar-bowl while it breakfasted.

Even so, it is necessary to add that Nathaniel Lawson had a beautiful
and accomplished daughter whose name was Cristobel. It is necessary to
record further that being a young woman of spirit, Miss Cristy Lawson
had insisted upon taking up newspaper work as a profession when the
need of adding to the family resources presented itself. For most of
the Lawson capital had gone into the loan company and her father's
philanthropic tendencies in the heyday of his earnings had made greater
inroads upon his personal fortune than he had realized at t