ere's another matter. Do you know the union officials in Brisbane?"

"I know all of them, intimately."

"Then you may be able to do something with them. We are informed that
they are implicated in all that's going on, the instigators of it. Bring
us evidence criminally implicating them and we will pay well."

"This is business," said the man, a little shamefacedly. "What will you
pay?"

Strong jotted some figures on a slip of paper. "If you are a friend of
these men," he said, passing the slip over, "you will know their value
apiece to you." A sneer he could not quite conceal peeped from under his
business tone.

"That concludes our business, I think," he continued, tearing the slip
up, having received it back. "I will instruct our secretary and you can
call on him this afternoon."

He touched an electric bell-button on his desk. A clerk appeared at the
door instantly.

"Show this man out by the back way," ordered Strong, glancing at the
clock. "Good-day!"

The summarily dismissed visitor had hardly gone when another clerk
announced Mr. Melsom.

"Anybody with him?"

"Yes, sir. A tall, bush-looking man."

"Show them both in."

"What sneaking brutes these fellows are!" Strong thought, contemptuously,
jotting instructions on some letters he was glancing through, working
away as one accustomed to making the most of spare minutes.

* * * * *

Mr. Melsom had left Ned and Strong together, having to attend to his own
business which had already been sufficiently interfered with by his
exertions on behalf of his pet theory of "getting things talked over."
Ned had felt inwardly agitated as he walked under the great archway and
up the broad iron stairway that led to the inner offices of this great
fortress-like building, the centre of the southern money-power. He had
noted the massive walls of hewn stone, the massive gates and the enormous
bolts, chains and bars. In the outer office he had glanced a little
nervously around the lofty, stuccoed, hall-like room, of which the
wood-work was as massive in its way as were the stone walls without and
of which the very glass of the partitions looked put in to stay, while
the counters and desks, with their polished brass-work and great
leathern-bound ledgers, seemed as solid as the floor itself; he wondered
curiously what all these clerks did who leaned engrossed over their desks
or flitted noiselessly here and there on the matting-covered flagstones
of the flooring. Why h