“I forget what your trouble was about,” said Mr. Tutt gently.  “Won’t you have a stogy?”

Mr. Barrows shook his head.

“I ain’t used to it,” he answered.  “Makes me cough.”  He gazed about him vaguely.

“Something about bonds, wasn’t it?” asked Mr. Tutt.

“Yes,” replied Mr. Barrows; “Great Lakes and Canadian Southern.”

“Of course!  Of course!”

“A wonderful property,” murmured Mr. Barrows regretfully.  “The bonds were perfectly good.  There was a defect in the foreclosure proceedings which made them a permanent underlying security of the reorganized company—­under The Northern Pacific R.R.  Co. vs.  Boyd; you know—­but the court refused to hold that way.  They never will hold the way you want, will they?” He looked innocently at Mr. Tutt.

“No,” agreed the latter with conviction, “they never will!”

“Now those bonds were as good as gold,” went on the old man; “and yet they said I had to go to prison.  You know all about it.  You were my lawyer.”

“Yes,” assented Mr. Tutt, “I remember all about it now.”

Indeed it had all come back to him with the vividness of a landscape seen during a lightning flash—­the crowded court, old Doc Barrows upon the witness stand, charged with getting money on the strength of defaulted and outlawed bonds—­picked up heaven knows where—­pathetically trying to persuade an unsympathetic court that for some reason they were still worth their face value, though the mortgage securing the debt which they represented had long since been foreclosed and the money distributed.

“I’d paid for ’em—­actual cash,” he rambled on.  “Not much, to be sure—­but real money.  If I got ’em cheap that was my good luck, wasn’t it?  It was because my brain was sharper than other folks’!  I said they had value and I say so now—­only nobody will believe it or take the trouble to find out.  I learned a lot up there in Sing Sing too,” he continued, warming to his subject.  “Do you know, sir, there are fortunes lying all about us?  Take gold, for instance!  There’s a fraction of a grain in every ton of sea water.  But the big people don’t want it taken out because it would depress the standard of exchange.  I say it’s a conspiracy—­and yet they jailed a man for it!  There’s great mineral deposits all about just waiting for the right man to come along and develop ’em.”

His lifted eye rested upon the engraving of Abraham Lincoln over Mr. Tutt’s desk.  “There was a man!” he exclaimed inconsequently; then stopped and ran his transparent, heavily veined old hand over his forehead.  “Where was I?  Let me see.  Oh, yes—­gold.  All those great properties could be bought at one time or another for a song.  It needed a pioneer!  That’s what I was—­a pioneer to find the gold where other people couldn’t find it.  That’s not any crime; it’s a service to humanity!  If only they’d have a little faith—­instead of locking you up.  The judge never looked up the law about those Great Lakes bonds!  If he had he’d have found out I was right!  I’d looked it up.  I studied law once myself.”