to his feet. "Let me tell you something, Minerva! All my life
I've been fighting against tyranny--the tyranny of the law, the tyranny
of power, the tyranny of money."

He drew fiercely on his stogy, which being desiccated flared like a
Roman candle.

"You don't need to tell me what this plan of reorganization is; because
they wouldn't propose one unless it was going to benefit them in some
way, and the only way it can be made to benefit them is at the expense
of the other stockholders. _Quod erat demonstrandum_."

Mr. Tutt seemed to have become distended somehow and to have spread over
the entire wall surface of his office like the genie which the
fisherman innocently permitted to escape from the bottle.

"There isn't one reorganization scheme in a hundred that isn't crooked
somewhere."

"According to that, if a business is unsuccessful it ought to be allowed
to go to pot for fear that somebody might make a profit in putting it on
its feet," she countered. "I think you're a violent, irascible,
prejudiced old man!"

"All the same," he retorted, "show me a reorganization scheme and I'll
show you a flimflam! What's this one? Bet you anything you like it's as
crooked as a ram's horn. I don't have to hear about it. Don't want to
read the plan. But I'll bust it--higher than Hades. See if I don't!"

He spat the remaining filaments of his stogy from the window and fished
out another.

"How do we come into it, anyhow?" he demanded.

"Doctor--I mean Mister Barrows," replied Miss Wiggin.

"Oh, yes. Of course. Well, you send for him to come down here and sign
the papers."

"What papers?"

"The complaint and order to show cause."

"But there isn't any."

"There will be, all right, by the time he gets here."

Miss Wiggin looked first puzzled and then pained.

"I don't understand," she said rather stiffly. "Do you mean that the
firm of Tutt & Tutt is going to engage in the enterprise of trying to
break up a plan of reorganization without knowing what it is? Won't you
lay us all open to the accusation of being strikers?"

Mr. Tutt's ordinarily brown complexion became slightly tinged with
purple.

"Let the court decide!" he cried hotly. "You say Scherer, Hunn,
Greenbaum & Beck are proposing to reorganize a mining company? You admit
we hold some of the stock? Well--as the natural-born and perennial
champion of the outraged minority--I'm going to attack it, and bust it,
and raise heck with it--on general principles