Constance signed the paper gravely, puckering her lips adorably as she made a careful business of it.  She gave the paper to Mr. Gamble, and he felt foolish enough to kiss the signature.  She found another paper upon her lap and opened it mechanically.  It was the subscription list.  Suddenly she burst into laughter.

“This last donation is from Angora!” she exclaimed.  “That’s a generous subscription, Mr. Gamble; but I don’t know whether to thank you or the horse.”

“Thank the goat, whoever that is,” he suggested, smiling into her eyes.  Great Scott, what eyes they were!  “Polly, Colonel Bouncer is over there by the band stand.  I’ll give you a nickel’s worth of peanuts if you’ll tell him what I’m doing.”

Mr. Gresham turned olive green.

“Wait a minute, Miss Parsons,” he protested.  “Mr. Gamble, you manage very nicely without Mr. Collaton.  If you knew of a probable purchaser for my property you have just taken a most unethical advantage of me.”

“You didn’t have your fingers crossed,” Gamble serenely reminded him.

“Not once,” corroborated Polly.  “I watched him all the time.  Just leave the colonel to me, Johnny.  I’ll scare him to death on the way here,” and she hurried away upon her errand.

“I suppose I must take my medicine,” said Gresham glumly.  “I should have sent you to my lawyer.  I might have known that your business ethics and my own would be entirely different.”

“What are business ethics, Mr. Gresham?” asked Constance with suspicious innocence.

“There do not seem to be any,” he responded.

“I never heard of any,” agreed Gamble cheerfully.  “My principle is, See it first and grab it.”

“That’s the rule of every highwayman, I believe,” charged Gresham.  “You will excuse me for a few moments, please?” And he hurried away in pursuit of a man whom he had seen passing.

“That’s the rule of life,” said Gamble.  “I had to learn it quick.  It took me four months to save up my first eighteen dollars.  I thought I’d never get it.”

“You must have wanted something very much,” suggested Constance, smiling sympathetically at her vision of this man as a boy, hoarding his pennies and nickels like a miser for so long a time.

“I did,” he admitted simply.  “I wanted a cook stove with silver knobs.  The day I had it brought home was the proudest of my life.  My mother knelt down and hugged it.  It had four lids and not one of them was cracked.”

Constance looked at him with a musing smile.  He must have been a handsome boy.

CHAPTER IV

IN WHICH GRESHAM FINDS JOHNNY’S OLD PARTNER ACCOMMODATING

Beneath the grandstand, Gresham caught up with a thin-faced and sandy-haired man whose colorless eyebrows and almost colorless eyes gave his waxlike countenance a peculiarly blank expression—­much as if one had drawn a face and had forgotten to mark in the features.  The man started nervously as Gresham touched him on the shoulder, and his thin lips parted in a frightened snarl.