The iron-founder got up and reached for his hat.
"You are certainly the friend in need, Griswold, if ever there was one," he said, gripping the hand of leave-taking as if he would crack the bones in it. "But there is one thing I'm going to ask you, and you mustn't take offense: this ninety thousand; could you afford to lose it?--or is it your whole stake in the game?"
Griswold's smile was the ironmaster's assurance that he had not offended.
"It is practically my entire stake--and I can very well afford to lose it in the way I have indicated. You may call that a paradox, if you like, but both halves of it are true."
"Then there is one other thing you ought to know, and I'm going to tell it now," Raymer went on. "We do a general foundry and machine business, but a good fifty per cent of our profit comes from the Wahaska & Pineboro Railroad repair work, which we have had ever since the road was opened."
Griswold was smiling again. "Why should I know that, particularly?" he asked.
"Because it is rumored that Jasper Grierson has been quietly absorbing the stock and bonds of the road, and if he means to remove me from the map----"
"I see," was the reply. "In that case you'll need a partner even worse than you do now. You can't scare me off that way. Shall I look for you at ten to-morrow?"
"At ten to the minute," said the rescued plunger; and he went down-stairs so full of mingled thankfulness and triumph that he mistook Doctor Farnham's horse for his own at the hitching-post two doors away, and was about to get into the doctor's buggy before he discovered his mistake.
Doctor Farnham had been about to make his daily call upon old Mrs. Breda, two doors up the street from the Widow Holcomb's, when he had climbed the stair of literary aspirations to give the convalescent his dinner bidding.
Griswold had accepted gratefully on the spur of the moment; and it was not until after Raymer had come and gone that sober second thought began to point out the risk he would run in meeting Charlotte Farnham face to face under conditions which would give her the best conceivable opportunity to recognize him, if recognition were possible.
The more he thought of it, the more he regretted his haste in consenting to incur the risk. Reflectively weighing the chances for and against, he made sure that in characterizing the young woman whose life-thread had been so strangely tangled with his own he had not overrated her intelligence. Giving heredity its due, with the keen-witted little physician for her father she could scarcely fail to measure up to the standard of those whose gifts are apperceptive. For many days she had had ample opportunity to familiarize herself with all the little identifying individualities of the deck-hand: reasoning from cause to effect, it might be assumed that her crushing responsibility had driven her to make use of it. Having recognized him once, under conditions far less favorable than those he was about to hazard, was it not more than probable that she would be able to do it again?