“Well?” said Horace, interrogatively.
Mr. Tenney did not smile any more, and he had done with digressions. “First of all,” he said, with his intent gray eyes fixed on the young man’s face, “what guarantee have I that you won’t give me away?”
“What guarantee can I give you?” replied Horace, also sitting up.
“Perhaps you are right,” said Tenney, thinking in his own swift-working mind that it would be easy enough to take care of this poor creature later on. “Well, then, you’ve been appointed Mrs. Minster’s lawyer in the interest of the Thessaly Manufacturing Company—this company here marked ‘D,’ in which the family has one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“I gathered as much. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me what it is all about.”
“I’m as transparent as plate-glass when I think a man is acting square with me,” said the hardware merchant. “This is how it is. Wendover and me got hold of a little rolling-mill and nail-works at Cadmus, down on the Southern Tier, a few years ago. Some silly people had put up the money for it, and there was a sort of half-crazy inventor fellow running it. They were making ducks and drakes of the whole thing, and I saw a chance of getting into the concern—I used to buy a good deal of hardware from them, and knew how they stood—and I spoke to Wendover, and so we went in.”
“That means that the other people were put out, I suppose,” commented Horace.
“Well, no; but they kind o’ faded away like. I wouldn’t exactly say they were put out, but after a while they didn’t seem to be able to stay in. But never mind them. Well, Cadmus was a bad location. The iron fields around there had pretty well petered out, and we were way off the main line of transportation. Business was fair enough; we made a straight ten per cent, year in and year out, because the thing was managed carefully; but that was in spite of a lot of drawbacks. So I got a scheme in my head to move the whole concern up here to Thessaly, and hitch it up with the Minster iron-works. We could save one dollar a ton, or forty-five thousand dollars in all, in the mere matter of freight alone, if we could use up their entire output. I may tell you, I didn’t appear in the business at all. I daresay Mrs. Minster don’t know to this day that I’m a kind of partner of hers. It happened that Wendover used to know her when she was a girl—they both come from down the Hudson somewhere—and so he worked the thing with her, and we moved over from Cadmus, hook, line, bob, and sinker, and we’re the Thessaly Manufacturing Company. Do you see?”
“So far, yes. She and her daughters have one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars cash in it. What is the rest of the company like?”
“It’s stocked at four hundred thousand dollars. We put in all our plant and machinery and business and good-will and so on at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and then we furnished seventy-five thousand dollars cash. So we hold two hundred and twenty-five shares to their one hundred and seventy-five.”