It occurred to Mr. Smith that no one has ever determined the precise idea upon which the Boston and Manhattan Railroad bases its schedules with its infrequent adherence thereto and customary deviation therefrom. Numberless ingenious theories have been advanced from time to time by untold thousands of exasperated patrons of the line; opinions of all colors, all temperatures, all degrees of light and shade have been volunteered, many with a violence that lends conviction, but all in vain. The thing remains as secret, as recondite, as baffling as ever. Good Bostonians regard attempts to solve the problem as not only futile but impertinent almost blasphemous accepting it as a factor in the general inscrutability which veils the world, and are content to let it remain such.

From these reflections it is patent that this large patience, this Oriental calm, had not yet come to Mr. Richard Smith of New York, who felt a certain irritation somewhat modified by amusement as he sat looking out of the car window at an apathetic brakeman who languidly gazed down the shining rails. For no cause that could be guessed, the train had now been resting nearly half an hour. The colored porter had ceased to perform prodigies by shutting between the upper berth and the wall three times as many blankets, mattresses, board partitions, and other paraphernalia as one would have thought the space could possibly contain, and was sitting in the corner section reflectively chewing a toothpick. There appeared to be a distressing lack of interest in the train on the part of all its proximate officials; no one seemed ready to alter the status quo.

Only a few miles to the eastward the roofs of Boston and the golden dome of the Capitol glittered in the morning sun, and there were the bright rails stretching clean and straight up to the very gates of the city. Railroading was a silly business anyway, thought Smith. An express train should be consistent, and not suddenly decide to become a landmark instead of a mobile and dynamic agent. He almost wished he had taken his ticket by the Fall River boat as he probably would have done had he been a Bostonian.

“Without reference to its political aspect,” he reflected, “I believe strongly in water. I might have been deeply disturbed if there had been a ground swell or a cross sea going around Point Judith, but I wouldn’t have been threatened with approaching senile decay en route.”

Smith was from New York. The elderly Bostonian who shared his section had thought so from the first. He had guessed it when Smith took out for the second time his watch and replaced it with a snap; he had felt his belief strengthened when his fellow traveler raised the sash and looked impatiently up the idle track; and he had dismissed all doubt when Smith, conversing with the apathetic brakeman, crisply indicated his desire to return from a study of still life to the moving picture show for which he had paid admission. The elderly Bostonian had observed many New Yorkers, but it had never ceased to be a source of surprise to him why they all should be so incessantly restless with an electric anxiety to be getting somewhere else. To his own thinking one place was very much the same as another, with the exception of Boston, and a comfortable inertia was by no means to be condemned. If people were waiting for one, and one didn’t appear, they merely waited a little longer that was all. If eternity was really eternity, there was exactly as much time coming as had passed. In any event no well-regulated New England mind would permit itself to become disturbed over so small a matter.

Smith, guessing perhaps something of this from his companion’s placid face, felt a momentary embarrassment at his own impatience.

“I’ve an engagement at ten o’clock,” he remarked, somewhat apologetically, to his conservative neighbor. “Do you suppose this train is going to let me keep it?”

The gentleman addressed cautiously expressed the opinion that if no further malign influences were felt, and the train were presently to start, the remainder of the journey would occupy comparatively little time.

And so in due course it came to pass as the elderly Bostonian had predicted, clearly proving if Smith had been open to accept proof that the Oriental method of reasoning is the most comfortable, whatever may be said of its efficiency. He had left home at eleven on the night before, and he arrived at the offices of Silas Osgood and Company, 175 Kilby Street, at exactly half an hour before eleven in the morning.

The exercise of walking up from the South Station, although the walk was a short one, had wholly dispelled the irritation of the delay, so that his smile was as genuine as ever when Mr. Silas Osgood held out his courtly hand in welcome It would have been a very bitter mood that could have withstood the Bostonian’s greeting.

“We were looking for you a little earlier in the morning,” he said, when the first greetings were over. “You come so seldom nowadays that we feel you ought to come as early as possible.”

Smith laughed.

“If you’d said that to me when I had been waiting two hours somewhere just the other side of North, East, West, or South Newton, I would have probably snarled like a dyspeptic terrier. Now, seeing you, sir, I can blandly reply that I came via Springfield and that the train was a trifle late.”

“Exceedingly courteous, I am sure, for one not a native,” agreed the other, smiling. “I am advised that the train has been known to be delayed.”

“Well, I’m here now, anyway,” Smith rejoined, “and very glad to be. It must be six weeks since I saw the good old gilded dome on the hill, and six weeks seems a long time or would, if they didn’t keep me pretty busy at the other end.”

The two men were by this time in Mr. Osgood’s private office, and the closing door shut out the click of typewriters and the other sounds of the larger room outside. As Mr. Osgood seated himself a trifle stiffly in his wide desk chair, Smith looked at him affectionately. The reflection came into his mind that the old gentleman was just a little older than when they had last met, and the thought gave a pang.

Silas Osgood was nearing his seventieth year. A long life of kindly and gentle thinking, of clean and correct living, had left him at this age as clear-eyed and direct of gaze as a child, but the veins showed blue in the rather frail hands, and the face was seamed with tiny wrinkles. Mr. Osgood had been in business in the fire insurance world of Boston for almost half a century. He was as well known as the very pavement of Kilby Street, that great local artery of insurance life, and the pulse of that life beat in him as strongly as his own.

To be an insurance man and by that is meant primarily a fire insurance man is in New England no mean or casual thing. South, West, in the newer and more open lands, where traditions are fewer and there is less time for the dignities and observance of the amenities of commerce, fire insurance takes its chance with a thousand other roads to an honest dollar. If a Western lawyer has a few spare hours, he hangs out an insurance sign and between briefs he or his clerk writes policies. The cashier of the Farmers’ State Bank in the prairie town ekes out his small salary with the commissions he receives as agent for a few companies. If a grist-mill owner or a storekeeper has a busy corner of two Southern streets where passers-by congregate on market day, he gets the representation of a fire company or two, and from time to time sends in a risk to the head office, whose underwriters go nearly frantic in endeavoring to decipher the hidden truth in the dusty reports of these well-intentioned amateurs.

But it is not so in New England. In New England fire insurance reaches its proudest estate. It is a profession, and to its true votaries almost a religion. Its sons have, figuratively speaking, been born with a rate book in one hand and a blank proof-of-loss clutched tightly in the other. And in the mouth a silver spoon or not, as the case might be, but in any event a conclusive argument for the superior loss-paying ability and liberality in adjustment of the companies they respectively represent. They are fire insurance men by birth, education, and tradition they and their fathers before them. Four generations back, Silas Osgood’s family had been supported by the staid old English public’s fear of fire. Three generations in Massachusetts had been similarly preserved from the pangs of hunger. Likenesses of all four were hanging on the wall of Mr. Osgood’s office; as to identity the first two were highly questionable, but their uniforms in the old prints showed up fresh and bright. In those old days gentlemen only, men of education and station, whose judgment and courage were beyond question, were intrusted with the responsibility of fighting the flames. It is hard to say why this important and exciting work should no longer attract the same sort of men to its service.

Hanging beside the four generations were the commissions of the fire companies locally represented in the Osgood office. Stout old companies they were, too, for the most part; one of the older ones was well in the second century of its triumph over fire and the fear of fire and the ashes thereof; this was a foreign company which Osgood held for old sake’s sake. The other commissions bore American signatures, most of them well known and well esteemed. On the wall right above where Smith sat was the gold seal of his own company, the Guardian, and against the seal the inexplicable hieroglyph which served Mr. James Wintermuth for his presidential signature. Then there was the great white sheet with the black border which set forth to all the world by these presents that Silas Osgood and Company were the duly accredited agents of the Atlantic Fire Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut. The narrow placque of the old Birmingham Indemnity of Birmingham, England, looked like a calling card beside the Atlantic’s flamboyant placard.

Smith, seeing Mr. Osgood’s look fixed for a moment on the parchment above his head, said inquiringly, “How long is it that you have represented the Guardian in Boston?”

The older man smiled reflectively and turned his eyeglass in his hand as he spoke.

“It was the year after the big fire when I first took the Guardian into my office. You are a close enough student of the game to know that that was just about forty years ago.”

Smith nodded.

“Before Richard Smith was born. But I remember the date. Who appointed you as agent?”

Mr. Osgood pointed to the scrawl at the foot of the framed commission.

“My old friend, James Wintermuth,” he said. He paused a moment. “I can almost see him now as he looked when he came to call on me in the old office farther down the street. Tall and quick-tempered, and you can imagine how strong in the fingers he was in those days! I recall I used to keep my glove on when I shook hands with him. He was a fine young chap, was James. Perhaps a little too hasty for us conservative New Englanders, but ” He broke off, a half-smile on his lips.

Smith remained silent.

“It’s a fault you young New Yorkers are apt to have,” the Bostonian presently went on. “Most of you are a trifle aggressive for us over here just a bit radical.”

The other laughed good-naturedly.

“I myself should say that my honored chief had lived down his radicalism long ago. It’s lucky for Silas Osgood and Company that there is a little of it left somewhere in the company, for the President convalesced from his attack of radicalism in eighteen eighty-five or thereabouts and has never been threatened with a relapse or a recurrence. You may criticize us, sir, but you will have to admit that unless there was a little radicalism in my own department, the Guardian would never have accepted the lines and the liability in this down-town district that you have sent us and are sending us now. I hope I’m conservative enough, but with all due respect to Mr. Wintermuth, what he calls conservatism often strikes me as dry rot.”

He stopped, laughing again.

“This is not an explosive protest,” he said. “It is merely the result of having traveled on the conservative Boston and Manhattan, which would turn a phlegmatic Pennsylvania Dutchman into a Nihilist.”

Then both men laughed together, and turned their attention to the business before them, Mr. Osgood’s pale silver head close beside Smith’s brown one.

In the outer office typewriters clicked, clients hung over desks, and the traffic of a busy morning proceeded. It was just about twelve o’clock when the clerks nearest the door stopped their work for a brief minute to look up and smile, for Charles Wilkinson, whenever he came to that office, timed his arrival with a skill that was perfectly understood by all. Mr. Wilkinson beamed blandly over the map counter, and still more blandly inquired whether Mr. Bennington Cole was in. Mr. Cole was, it appeared, at his desk, and Mr. Wilkinson required no one to show him the way.

“Hello, Benny,” he said cheerfully. “You hardly expected to see me here to-day, did you? But I’m the early bird, all right. The excessively shy and unseasonable habits of the matinal worm never appealed favorably to me, but we have to have him once in a while, so here I am. You know what for, don’t you? Or do you?”

Cole surveyed his visitor dispassionately.

“I fancy I can guess,” he replied.

“No, upon my word,” the other rejoined with spirit; “you do me a grave injustice, Benny. I’ve already had luncheon that is to say, I’ve just had breakfast. You can more fully appreciate the significance of my call when I tell you that I came to you directly from the breakfast table. No, sir, the object of this visit is strictly business.”

Bennington Cole gravely buttoned up his coat and thrust both hands into his pockets.

Mr. Wilkinson smiled buoyantly.

“Benny, you’ve a delightful surprise in store for you,” he said. “Having astonished you by telling you that I was not open to an invitation to lunch, I am going to follow it up by assuring you that I do not intend to suggest the extension of even the paltriest of pecuniary accommodations. I am after bigger game.”

Cole’s suspicion melted into a semblance of interest.

“You don’t mean ” he began.

“Yes, but I do, though,” said the other. “That’s the precise meaning of this pious pilgrimage at this ungodly hour. I want to find out where you keep that worm. Yesterday afternoon, at the Hurds’, you had an idea. You know you did you can’t conceal it from my piercing sense of penetration. And your idea had the ring of real currency when you accidentally dropped it. So I’m here to collaborate, that’s all.”

Mr. Osgood’s junior partner looked around at the clerks, who hastily resumed their interrupted duties.

“Come in here,” he said to the visitor, and he led his guest into an inner office next to Mr. Osgood’s own, and closed the door behind him.

“I did have an idea,” he conceded, as he motioned Wilkinson to a seat, “and it was an idea that had several things to recommend it. But it was a business proposition, and if you will pardon my saying so, Charlie, you are not the kind of a collaborator I would choose, if I were doing the choosing.”

“But you’re not, my boy,” replied the other, unabashed. “I’m doing the choosing, myself, and I choose you. Your idea was palpably based on separating my barnacled connection from some of the ghastly pile of glittering gold that he has taken, five cents at a time, from the widows, orphans, blind, halt, and lame who patronize his trolley lines. Elucidate forthwith, Benny in the vernacular, unbelt. I am listening.”

Cole was reflecting. No one knew better than he how little regard John M. Hurd really felt for this mercurial youth. Yet Mr. Hurd had resisted with entire success all other means of approach. After all, family connections counted for something, even with the retentive old trolley magnate. So when at last he spoke, it was with the determination to show a part of his hand, at least, to Wilkinson.

“Mr. Hurd is President of the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company,” he began.

His visitor smiled affably.

“There is a popular impression to that effect,” he admitted.

“Silas Osgood and Company and ” he paused a moment “Bennington Cole are in the fire insurance business. The Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company carries no fire insurance on any of its properties. Well,” he said sharply, “do you begin to see how you come into this?”

“See what?” asked Wilkinson, blankly.

“The insurable value of the various properties of the company must amount to six or eight million dollars. The average rate on those properties would probably be about seventy-five cents per hundred dollars a year for insurance. That would make a premium of say fifty thousand dollars per annum. The commission to the insurance broker who handled that line who could secure it and control it would be ten per cent of fifty thousand, or five thousand dollars. Half that amount I am doing these sums for you so that you can catch the idea would be twenty-five hundred without any risk to yourself and every year of your life. Do you think the game worth a try?”

Wilkinson sat up with eager interest.

“Why half? Why not both halves?” he inquired.

The other man spread his hands before him in a gesture as well recognized among elder peoples as it is to-day.

“Naturally I would expect half for originating the scheme, drawing up the schedule in its proper form, securing the lowest rate, and placing the line with the various companies. You couldn’t do those things, you know; it takes knowledge of the business.”

His visitor once more sat back in his chair.

“And all I have to do is to get Uncle John to take out an insurance policy on his trolley cars! A mere nothing! I’m astonished that you offer me so much as half for so simple an office. Really, Benny, you are losing your faculties. I can almost see them evaporating. Yes, the time will come when some one of our mutual friends, driving past the Meadow Creek Paresis Club, where Dr. McMullen receives certain amiable but not entirely responsible persons, will behold you hanging cheerily by one hand from the pergola roof with a vacuous smile on your twitching lips, and will say to me sadly: ’Charlie, you knew him, didn’t you, in the old days, when his mind was as keen and bright as an editor’s knife?’ And with chastened melancholy I will respond: ’Yes, George, it is true. And moreover I was with him on the day when his mind commenced to give way. The day he offered me a full half of the spoils of my own what do you call it? oh, yes, arbalest.’”

Cole laughed, and not altogether pleasantly.

“Well, if you can get John M. to carry insurance, I’ll see that you are not disappointed in the terms of our agreement.”

“Do you know, Benny, somehow I’d rather have it in writing. Suppose we say one third to you and two thirds to me. After all, I need the money, you see, and you don’t.”

“Aren’t we counting our chickens a good while before they have emerged from the incubator?” the other suggested.

“Very likely,” Wilkinson readily agreed. “But I find that if I ever indulge in that diverting form of mathematics it has to be before the hatching. The little yellow rascals never stay around long enough afterward to permit themselves to be counted.”

Bennington Cole slowly picked up a pen and drew toward him a sheet of paper; more slowly still he wrote what he described as a gentleman’s agreement between Charles Wilkinson and himself. That young man sat back and studied the face of his associate with shrewd, half-shut eyes. Presently Cole stopped writing.

“I fancy this will serve,” he said.

“Read the Machiavellian document,” demanded Wilkinson, placidly. And Cole read.

“’Agreement between Bennington Cole and Charles Wilkinson. Said Bennington Cole agrees that if said Charles Wilkinson shall secure control of the fire insurance of the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company, said Bennington Cole shall handle such account to the best of his ability and shall pay to said Charles Wilkinson two thirds of all brokerage commissions received thereby.’”

Said Charles Wilkinson reached for the paper.

“It seems to be in order,” he said presently. “Sign it and date it, Benny, and bring in old Stewpan there to witness it. This is a business proposition, and I know how such things ought to be handled.”

It was duly signed and duly witnessed by the aged and anemic cashier of the Osgood office, and Mr. Wilkinson placed it carefully in his pocketbook. Then he rose with alacrity.

“I’m sure you’ll pardon my insistence on this little technicality,” he said smoothly; “but you business men, you professional men, are so shrewd, so very alert and quick of mind, that a comparative novice like myself is mere wax in your strong, deft fingers. . . . And now to cipher out some way to secure the golden apple which hangs so close to hand, yet so very dragon-guarded.”

“That’s your work,” rejoined Cole. “I won’t attempt to offer suggestions. Nearly every insurance broker in Boston has at one time or another had a go at John M. Hurd. Boring him to death has been unsuccessfully tried several times, but as you are in the family, you may of course have superior facilities to any of your predecessors. Blackmail might accomplish something. But really I can’t help you any, Charlie. If I had any plan, I’d deserve to hang from your friend’s pergola roof for giving it to you instead of using it myself. I guess this is where you begin to do a little hard thinking.”

“What marvelous incisiveness you possess, Benny,” his friend commented. “It is an uplift to hear you. But you see thinking is quite in my line. Any one who has had to think as hard as I how to keep the lean white wolf of the Green Mountains or vice versa from my shifting doorstep, certainly need not tremble before the necessity of thought. But I have learned this when I want to get something I don’t know how to get, I invariably regard it the height of sapience to go and ask some one who does know how. In this case I can ask without going, for the very man is here at hand.”

“I’ve already told you that I can assist you no further,” said Cole. “I’ve given you the idea. You’ll have to do the rest, yourself.”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of you,” Wilkinson rejoined coolly. “I meant a man of perhaps not better, but certainly rather broader, experience. I shall go for advice to Mr. Silas Osgood.”

And he opened the door and disappeared through it before Cole could voice a protest. He would have much preferred that the senior partner know nothing of the scheme unless it should take concrete form by its success. If Wilkinson by any chance should secure the traction company’s insurance, the business should properly be handled by the firm of Silas Osgood and Company, and not by Bennington Cole individually. However, the mischief was already done, for he could hear Charles’ cheerful voice greeting the two men in the other office. Rather reluctantly he followed.

He found Wilkinson sitting easily on the arm of a chair, talking rapidly and confidentially to Mr. Osgood, who regarded him with indulgence but wonder, as one who might come suddenly on a charming lady lunatic.

“I don’t think I know your friend,” Wilkinson was saying, sotto voce, in Mr. Osgood’s ear. Then, as Cole entered, Smith rose to shake hands, and the introduction was made.

“Mr. Smith, General Agent of the Guardian of New York Mr. Wilkinson.”

“Delighted to meet you, Mr. Smith.” He turned to the elder man. “Mr. Osgood, I’ve come to see you on a matter of business an important matter upon which I wish your advice. And I not only wish it, but I need it, as you will appreciate when I tell you that my occupation for the next few weeks, months, or years as the case may be will consist in endeavoring to extort a little money from Mr. John M. Hurd.”

Cole coughed.

“A most expressive cough, my dear Benny, and the interpretation is clearly that there is no innovation about such a battle of wits. But, Mr. Osgood, there is a difference.” He looked inquiringly at Cole. “By the way, is there any reason why we should not speak freely before Mr. Smith?”

“Mr. Smith is a Company man; he will do nothing to disturb your plan,” said Cole. “Go ahead, now you’ve started.”

Wilkinson proceeded.

“I am about to take charge of insuring all the properties of the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company, John M. Hurd, President,” he announced.

Mr. Osgood permitted himself a slight smile.

“My dear young friend,” he said, “you have given yourself a life sentence at hard labor.”

Wilkinson sat down.

“All the better reason why I need assistance,” he rejoined. “I need everybody’s assistance. But only to get started. When I’m started properly I can look after myself.”

“My boy,” said the veteran underwriter, kindly, “I have known John M. Hurd since he was thirty years old. I knew him when what is now the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company consisted of two cars, four horses, and three miles of single track. And he never carried a dollar of insurance then, and he never has since. I have seen the brightest brokers in Boston go into his office and come out in anywhere from three to twenty minutes; and not one of them ever got anything at all for his pains. Better give it up, my boy; you’ll save yourself more or less trouble, and the result will be the same.”

The young man laughed.

“There’s one point of dissimilarity that I see already,” he replied. “The time of the brightest brokers in Boston is valuable; mine is not. Really, you’re not very encouraging, but I didn’t expect you to be. I know my step-uncle, and I’m prepared for a stiff and extensive campaign. All I’m asking for is a detonator something to start the action, you know, or something novel in the way of an explosive. Perhaps an adaptation of one of those grenades that the Chinese pirates throw when they want to drive their victims suffocating into the sea. I realize that there isn’t much use engaging Uncle John with ordinary Christian weapons; he’s practically bomb-proof.”

“I am afraid,” said Mr. Osgood, slowly, “that I am not very expert in the manufacture of noxious piratical chemicals. You will have to seek your inspiration elsewhere.”

Smith turned to Wilkinson. Heretofore the representative of the Guardian had taken no part in the conversation.

“Would you mind stating, without quite so many figures of speech, just what you want?” he asked quietly.

“Certainly. What I want is something, some handle which will get me John M. Hurd’s attention just long enough to make him listen to me. If I can get him to listen, I stand a chance.”

“You say he carries no fire insurance on any of the trolley properties?” the New Yorker inquired thoughtfully.

“No,” replied Mr. Osgood. “He has a small insurance fund perhaps thirty or forty thousand dollars. He pays into this each year a part of what his insurance would cost him, and out of this fund is paid what losses the company sustains. And we must confess that so far the scheme has worked well. His losses have been much less than he would have paid in premiums to the companies.”

“A fund yes. That is all well and good, unless there is a great congestion of value at some single point, or at a very few points. Tell me, how much value is there in that main car barn on Pemberton Street the new one next to the power plant?”

“Probably over a half a million dollars at night, when the cars are all there,” said Cole.

“And with the power house almost a million, then?”

“Almost,” Cole agreed.

Smith rose and walked over to the window; the others watched him in silence. “What kind of people hold the stock of the traction company?” he asked suddenly.

“I fancy Mr. Hurd himself swings a very big block,” Cole answered. “And his directors have a good deal. It’s easily carried the banks up here will loan on it almost up to the market value.”

Smith still looked thoughtfully out the window.

“And I presume the directors and other stockholders take advantage of that fact?” he inquired.

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Osgood replied. “We have a lot of it as collateral for loans in the Charlestown Trust Company, of which I am a director.”

“And is it actively traded in on the Exchange?” the New Yorker continued.

“No. Odd lots mainly, from time to time. But the price is remarkably steady. It is regarded about as safe as a bond.”

Smith returned to the seated group.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “banks do strange things at times, but they are usually grateful for information when it is of value. They have probably never taken the trouble to find out whether the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction was properly protected against a fire by which I mean a big fire; they probably have assumed that it was. If it were to become known in financial circles that their insurance fund was forty thousand dollars and that they stood to lose one million dollars if there were a big fire in Pemberton Street to-night, how many of those borrowers do you think would be asked by the banks to reduce their loans or to substitute in part other collateral of a less speculative sort? It might even affect the price of the stock on the Exchange rather unfortunately. Some of those directors might have an unpleasant half-hour.”

He paused. Wilkinson’s face expressed the most eager attention.

“And I want to say to you, gentlemen, that a general fire in the congested section of this city is in my opinion not so improbable a thing as you Bostonians imagine. The conflagration hazard in Boston’s congested district is not a thing one can exactly calculate, but it would be difficult to overestimate its gravity. . . . There’s your grenade, Mr. Wilkinson.”

Wilkinson leaped to his feet.

“I see it,” he cried. “Leave it to me. It’s as good as done. It’s merely a question of time.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Cole, curiously.

Wilkinson made for the door.

“Do?” he cried. “Do? I’m going to load the grenade. Gentlemen, good morning.”