He held up his hand, checking over his fingers as he talked.

“Here’s the whole proposition,” said he.  “You can consider it.  Welton and I will turn over the whole works to you, lock, stock and barrel, for two years.  You know the practical side of the business as well as you ever will, and you’ve got a good head on you.  At the end of that time, turn in your balance sheet.  We’ll see how you come out, and how much it costs a thousand feet to do these things outside the schoolroom.”

“If I took it up, I couldn’t make it pay quite as well as by present methods,” Bob warned.

“Of course not.  Any reasonable man would expect to spend something by way of insurance for the future.  But the point is, the operations must pay.  Think it over!”

They emerged into the mill clearing.  Welton rolled out to greet them, his honest red face aglow with pleasure over greeting again his old friend.  They pounded each other on the back, and uttered much facetious and affectionate abuse.  Bob left them cursing each other heartily, broad grins illuminating their weatherbeaten faces.

XL

Bob’s obvious course was to talk the whole matter over with his superior officer, and that is exactly what he intended to do.  Instead, he hunted up Amy.  He justified this course by the rather sophistical reflection that in her he would encounter the most positive force to the contrary of the proposition he had just received.  Amy stood first, last and all the time for the Service; her heart was wholly in its cause.  In her opinion he would gain the advantage of a direct antithesis to the ideas propounded by his father.  This appeared to Bob an eminently just arrangement, but failed to account for a certain rather breathless excitement as he caught sight of Amy’s sleek head bending over a pan of peas.

“Amy,” said he, dropping down at her feet, “I want your advice.”

She let fall her hands and looked at him with the refreshing directness peculiarly her own.

“Father wants me to take charge of the Wolverine Company’s operations,” he began.

“Well?” she urged him after a pause.

“What do you think of it?”

“I thought you had worked that all out for yourself some time ago.”

“I had.  But father and Mr. Welton are getting a little too old to handle such a proposition, and they are looking to me—­” he paused.

“That situation is no different than it has been,” she suggested.  “What else?”

Bob laughed.

“You see through me very easily, don’t you?  Well, the situation is changed.  I’m being bribed.”

“Bribed!” Amy cried, throwing her head back.

“Extra inducements offered.  They make it hard for me to refuse, without seeming positively brutal.  They offer me complete charge—­to do as I want.  I can run the works absolutely according to my own ideas.  Don’t you see how I am going to hurt them when I refuse under such circumstances?”