“I may.”

“I’m just as glad to have some of ’em off my hands, and this looks to me like a nasty one.  I don’t like those Mercer people.  The last farmer they ran over there raised hell.”

“I shouldn’t blame this one if he did, if he ever gets well enough,” said Austen.  Young Mr. Tooting paused with a lighted match halfway to his cigar and looked at Austen shrewdly, and then sat down on the desk very close to him.

“Say, Aust, it sometimes sickens a man to have to buy these fellows off.  What?  Poor devils, they don’t get anything like what they ought to get, do they?  Wait till you see how the Railroad Commission’ll whitewash that case.  It makes a man want to be independent.  What?”

“This sounds like virtue, Ham.”

“I’ve often thought, too,” said Mr. Tooting, “that a man could make more money if he didn’t wear the collar.”

“But not sleep as well, perhaps,” said Austen.

“Say, Aust, you’re not on the level with me.”

“I hope to reach that exalted plane some day, Ham.”

“What’s got into you?” demanded the usually clear-headed Mr. Tooting, now a little bewildered.

“Nothing, yet,” said Austen, “but I’m thinking seriously of having a sandwich and a piece of apple pie.  Will you come along?”

They crossed the square together, Mr. Tooting racking a normally fertile brain for some excuse to reopen the subject.  Despairing of that, he decided that any subject would do.

“That Humphrey Crewe up at Leith is smart—­smart as paint,” he remarked.  “Do you know him?”

“I’ve seen him,” said Austen.  “He’s a young man, isn’t he?”

“And natty.  He knows a thing or two for a millionaire that don’t have to work, and he runs that place of his right up to the handle.  You ought to hear him talk about the tariff, and national politics.  I was passing there the other day, and he was walking around among the flowerbeds.  ‘Ain’t your name Tooting?’ he hollered.  I almost fell out of the buggy.”

“What did he want?” asked Austen, curiously.  Mr. Tooting winked.

“Say, those millionaires are queer, and no mistake.  You’d think a fellow that only had to cut coupons wouldn’t be lookin’ for another job, wouldn’t you?  He made me hitch my horse, and had me into his study, as he called it, and gave me a big glass of whiskey and soda.  A fellow with buttons and a striped vest brought it on tiptoe.  Then this Crewe gave me a long yellow cigar with a band on it and told me what the State needed, —­macadam roads, farmers’ institutes, forests, and God knows what.  I told him all he had to do was to get permission from old man Flint, and he could have ’em.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He said Flint was an intimate friend of his.  Then he asked me a whole raft of questions about fellows in the neighbourhood I didn’t know he’d ever heard of.  Say, he wants to go from Leith to the Legislature.”