, a thick fog, and
I wish you would clear the atmosphere."

"Well," said Caruthers, "I am off. I don't know what to take with me,"
he added, looking about. "I suppose I owe you more or less, and I'll
leave things just as they are until I am prepared to face a
statement."

"All right. Good day."

"But you won't shake hands?"

"Yes, through the fog," said Lyman, holding out his hand. Caruthers
grasped it, dropped it, as if he too felt that it came through a fog,
and hastened out. Just outside he met Warren coming in. "What's he
looking so serious about?" the editor asked.

"Sit down," said Lyman. "Don't take the chair he had--the other one,
that's it. Well, we have split the law trust and he goes across the
square to open a new office."

"Is that so? Well, I reckon there's a good deal of the wolf about him.
Yes, sir, he has seen me bleeding under the heel of the Express
Company, without so much as giving me the----"

"Moist eye of sympathy," Lyman suggested.

"That's all right, and it fits. Say, you are more of a writer than a
lawyer. And that's exactly in line with what I came in to tell you. I
got a half column ad. this morning from a patent medicine concern in
the North, and they want an additional write-up. It all comes through
your sketches."

"Do you think so?"

"I know it. A drummer told me this morning that he had heard some
fellows talking about my paper in a St. Louis hotel, the best hotel in
the town, mind you--and I can see from the exchanges that the
_Sentinel_ is making tracks away out yonder in the big road. And it's
all owing to that quaint Yankee brain of yours, Lyman. Yes, it is.
Why, the best lawyers in this town have written for my paper. The
Circuit Judge reviewed the life of Sir Edmond Saunders, whoever he
was, and Capt. Fitch, the prosecuting attorney, wrote two columns on
Napoleon, to say nothing of the hundreds of things sent in by the bar
in general, and it all amounted to nothing, but you come along in the
simplest sort of a way and make a hit."

"I'm glad you think so."

"Oh, it's not a question of think; I know it. And now I'll tell you
what we'll do. We'll let this law end of the building take care of
itself and we'll give our active energies to the paper. You do the
editing and I'll do the business. You put stuff into the columns and
I'll wrestle with the express agent. And I'll divide with you."

"Warren," said Lyman, getting up and putting his hands on the
newspaper man'