This news at any other time would have set his hopes to fluttering.  If Peter’s director was made of money and intent on throwing it away; and if a blast furnace or a steel plant, or whatever could turn worthless rock into pruning-hooks and ploughshares, should by some act of folly be built in the valley at the foot of the hill he owned, why something might come of it.  But, then, so might skies fall and everybody have larks on toast for breakfast.  Until then his concern was with Garry.

He realized that the young architect was too broken down physically and mentally to decide any question of real moment.  His will power was gone and his nerves unstrung.  The kindest thing therefore that any friend could do for him, would be to step in and conduct the fight without him.  Garry’s wishes to keep the situation from Corinne would be respected, but that did not mean that his own efforts should be relaxed.  Yet where would he begin, and on whom?  MacFarlane had just told him that Morris was away from home and would not be back for several days.  Peter was out of the question so far as his own means—­or lack of means—­was concerned, and he could not, of course, ask him to go into debt for a man who had never been his friend, especially when neither he nor Garry had any security to offer.

He finally decided to talk the whole matter over with MacFarlane and act on his advice.  The clear business head of his Chief cleared the situation as a north-west wind blows out a fog.

“Stay out of it, Jack,” he exclaimed in a quick, positive voice that showed he had made up his mind long before Jack had finished his recital.  “Minott is a gambler, and so was his father before him.  He has got to take his lean with his fat.  If you pulled him out of this hole he would be in another in six months.  It’s in his blood, just as much as it is in your blood to love horses and the woods.  Let him alone;—­Corinne’s stepfather is the man to help; that’s his business, and that’s where Minott wants to go.  If there is anything of value in this Warehouse Company, Arthur Breen & Co. can carry the certificates for Minott until they go up and he can get out.  If there is nothing, then the sooner Garry sells out and lets it go the better.  Stay out, Jack.  It’s not in the line of your duty.  It’s hard on his wife and he is having a devil of a row to hoe, but it will be the best thing for him in the end.”

Jack listened in respectful silence, as he always did, to MacFarlane’s frank outburst, but it neither changed his mind nor cooled his ardor.  Where his heart was concerned his judgment rarely worked.  Then, loyalty to a friend in distress was the one thing his father had taught him.  He did not agree with his Chief’s view of the situation.  If Garry was born a gambler, he had kept that fact concealed from him and from his wife.  He recalled the conversation he had had with him some weeks before, when he was so enthusiastic over the money he was going to make in the new Warehouse deal.