“But how can I let him get away with this deal?” Matt queried soberly.

“By rushing in on him now and simulating a terrific rage.  Just imagine you’re on the bridge of a steamer making up to a dock against a strong flood tide, with stupid mates fore and aft, and rotten lines that won’t hold when you get them over the dolphins, and the tide has grabbed you and slammed you into the dock and done five hundred dollars’ worth of damage—­just feel like that, Matt—­”

“If I do I’ll cuss something scandalous,” Matt warned him.

“The harder the better.”

“And I’m to keep this money in my pocket, and let him cancel my charter, and take that northbound cargo away from me, and collect the freight on me—­”

“Exactly that!  He’ll withdraw his suit against you to-morrow and release your bank account, and then you decline to pay him the eighteen thousand dollars you owe him until he gives an accounting of the freight money he’s collected.  He’ll tell you to go to Halifax, but you mustn’t mind.  It’s going to make him as happy as a fool to think he beat you in the end.”

A slow smile spread over Matt’s face.

“Skinner,” he said.  “You’re a good old wagon, that’s what you are.  I’m sorry we ever had any mix-up, and we’ll never have another—­after this one—­and this is going to be a fake.  You see, Skinner, if we’re going to put one over on Cappy let’s have it one worth while—­so this is the program.  I’ve just arrived, with blood in my eye, to clean out the Blue Star office, and I’m starting in with the general manager.  Clinch me now, and we’ll wrestle all over the office and bang against the furniture and that door there—­”

As Cappy Ricks was wont to remark, Mr. Skinner could “get” one before one could “get” one’s self.

“Get out of my office, you infernal rowdy,” he yelled loud enough to awaken Cappy Ricks next door.  Then he clinched with Matt Peasley.

“A good fight,” said Cappy Ricks half an hour after Matt Peasley had been pried away from Mr. Skinner and forced to listen to reason, “is the grandest thing in life.  Now there’s that crazy boy gone out in a rage just because he had the presumption to tangle with me in a business deal and get dog-gone well licked!  He put it all over me yesterday, thinking I couldn’t protect myself.  Well, he knows better now, Skinner; he knows better now!  In-fer-nal young scoundrel!  Wow, but wasn’t he a wild man, Skinner?  Wasn’t he though?” And Cappy Ricks chuckled.

“You have probably cured him of sucking eggs,” Mr. Skinner observed enigmatically.

“Well, I handed the young pup a dose of cayenne pepper, at any rate,” Cappy bragged, “and I wouldn’t have missed doing it for a cool hundred thousand.  Why, Skinner, a man might as well retire from business when he gets so weak and feeble and soft-headed he doesn’t know how to protect himself in the clinches and break-aways.”