it over his head."

"No, I'll kill the dastard!" howled L. W. rebelliously and slammed the
door in a rage.

A swooning sickness came over Mary Fortune as she sat, waiting stonily,
at her desk; but when McBain came back and sat down beside her she
typed on, automatically, as he spoke. Then she woke at last, as if
from a dream, to hear his harsh, discordant voice; and a sudden
resentment, a fierce, passionate hatred, swept over her as he shouted
in her ear. A hundred times she had informed him politely that she was
not deaf when she wore her ear-'phone, and a hundred times he had
listened impatiently and gone on in his sharp, rasping snarl. She drew
away shuddering as he looked over some papers and cleared his throat
for a fresh start; and then, without reason that he could ever divine,
she burst into tears and fled.

She came back later, but the moment he began dictating she pushed back
her chair and rose up.

"Mr. McBain," she said tremulously, "you don't need to shout at me. I
give you notice--I shall leave on the first."

It was plainly a tantrum, such as he had observed in women, a case,
pure and simple, of nerves; but Andrew McBain let it pass. She could
spell--a rare quality in typists--and was familiar with legal forms.

"Ah, my dear Miss Fortune," he began propitiatingly, "I hope you will
reconsider, I'm sure. It's a habit I have, when dictating a brief, to
speak as though addressing the court. Perhaps, under the
circumstances, you could take off your instrument and my voice would
be--ahem--just about right."

"No! It drives me crazy!" she cried in a passion. "It makes everybody
think I'm so deaf!"

She broke down at that and McBain discreetly withdrew and was gone for
the rest of the day. It was best, he had learned, when young women
became emotional, to absent himself for a time. And the next day, sure
enough, she came back, smiling cheerfully, and said no more of leaving
her job. She was, in fact, more obliging than before and he judged
that the tantrum had passed.

With L. W., however, the case was different. He claimed to be an
Indian in his hates; and a mining engineer, dropping in from New York,
told a story that staggered belief. Rimrock Jones was there, the talk
of the town, reputed to be enormously rich. He smoked fifty-cent
cigars, wore an enormous black hat and put up at the Waldorf Hotel.
Not only that but he was in all the papers as associating with the
kings of finance.