"Certainly not!" declared the Supreme Exalted Ruler with loud rect.i.tude.

"This thousand dollars belongs in the insurance reserve fund."

"Tut, tut," interposed Wallingford. "Your alarm clock is out of order.

You just now paid a death claim with that money, and the reserve fund is out that much. A private individual, however, just now bought a thousand dollars' worth of stock in the reorganized Friendly Hands Trust Company, and you have the pay in advance. Let Mr. Neil have his fifty dollars, and give me a check for my two hundred and fifty; then we'll go out to hunt a decent suite of offices and buy the furniture for it."

"There wouldn't be much of the thousand left after that," objected Mr.

Clover, frowning.

"Why not? You don't suppose we are going to pay cash for anything, do you?" returned Wallingford in surprise. "My credit's good, if yours isn't."

His credit! He had not been in town four hours! As Mr. Clover looked him over again, however, he saw where he was wrong. Mr. Wallingford's mere appearance was as good as a bond. He would not ask for credit; he would take it. Mr. Clover, in a quick a.n.a.lysis of this thought, decided that this rich man's resources were so vast that they shone through his very bearing. Mr. Wallingford, at that same moment, after having paid his enormous hotel bill in New York and the expenses of his luxurious trip, had only ten dollars in the world.

"Now then," suggested Mr. Clover as he pa.s.sed the hypnotically won check to his new partner, "we might as well conclude our personal business.

I'll make you over half my stock in the company, and take your two thousand."

"All right," agreed Wallingford very cheerfully, and they both sat down to write.

Mr. Clover transferred to Mr. Wallingford forty-three shares of stock in the Friendly Hands Trust Company, Incorporated, and received a rectangular slip of paper in return. His face reddened as he examined it.

"Why, this isn't a check!" he said sharply. "It's a note for ninety days!"

"Sure!" said J. Rufus Wallingford. "In our talk there wasn't a word said about cash."

"But cash is what I want, and nothing but cash!" exploded the other, smacking his hairy fist upon his desk.

"How foolish!" chided J. Rufus smilingly. "I see I'll have to teach you a lot about business. Draw up your chairs and get my plan in detail. If, after that, Clover, you do not want my note, you may give it back and go broke in your own way. Here's what we will do. We will organize a new operating company for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, in twenty-five-dollar shares. We will buy over the old ten-thousand-dollar company for one hundred and fifty thousand in stock of the new company.

Dividing this pro rata, you and I, Clover, will each have nearly twenty-six hundred shares. Mr. Neil, in place of his present ten shares, will have six hundred, and we shall have left four thousand shares of treasury stock. These we will sell among your members. We will reduce your present insurance rate one fourth, and use the hundred thousand dollars we take in on stock sales to get new members to whom to sell more stock. In the meantime, we'll see money every day. You and I, Clover, will each draw a hundred a week, and I think Mr. Neil will be pretty well satisfied if he drags down fifty."

The pleased expression upon Mr. Neil's face struggled with the deepening creases on his brow. Fifteen dollars a week was the most he had ever earned in his life, but he was so full of fraternal insurance figures that his skin p.r.i.c.kled.

"But how about the insurance end of it?" he interposed. "How will we ever keep up at that ridiculously low rate? That might do for a while, but as our membership becomes older the death rate will increase on us and we can't pay it. Why, the mortality tables--" and he reached for the inevitable facts and figures.

"Who's talking about insurance?" demanded Wallingford. "I'm talking about how to get money. Put up the little red dope-book. Clover, you get busy right away and write a lot of circus literature about the grand work your members will be doing for the widows and orphans by buying this stock; also how much dividend it will pay them. When the treasury stock is sold, and we have a big enough organization to absorb it, we will begin to unload our own shares and get out. If you clean up your sixty-four thousand dollars in this year, I guess you will be willing to let the stockholders elect new officers and conduct their own Friendly Hands Trust Company any way they please, won't you?"

Mr. Clover quietly folded Mr. Wallingford's note and put it in his pocket.

"Let's go out and rent some new offices," he said.

He came back, at Mr. Neil's call, to write out that fifty-dollar check, and incidentally made out one for himself in a like amount.

"What do you think of him, anyhow?" asked Neil with a troubled countenance.

"Think of him?" repeated Clover with enthusiasm. "He's the greatest ever! If I had known him five years ago I'd be worth a million to-day!"

"But is this scheme on the level?" asked Neil.

"That's the beauty of it," said Clover, exulting like a schoolboy. "The law can't touch us any place."

"Maybe not," admitted Neil; "but somehow I don't quite like it."

"I guess you'll like your fifty a week when it begins to come in, and your fifteen thousand when we clean up," retorted Clover.

"You bet!" said Neil, but he began to do some bewildered figuring on his own account. His head was in a whirl.

CHAPTER X

AN AMAZING COMBINATION OF PHILANTHROPY AND PROFIT IS INAUGURATED

Minnie Bishop came to work for the n.o.ble Order of Friendly Hands on the day that they moved into offices more in keeping with the magnificence of Mr. Wallingford, and she was by no means out of place amid the mahogany desks and fine rugs and huge leather chairs.

"Her smile alone is worth fifty dollars a week to the business," Clover admitted, but they only paid her five at the start.

She had more to recommend her, however, than white teeth and red lips.

Wallingford himself was surprised to find that, in spite of her apparently frivolous bent, she had considerable ability and was quick to learn. From the first he a.s.sumed a direct guardianship over her, and his approaches toward a slightly more than paternal friendship she considered great fun. At home she mimicked him, and when her older sister tried to talk to her seriously about it she only laughed the more. Clover she amused continually, but Neil fell desperately in love with her from the start, and him she flouted most unmercifully. Really, she liked him, although she would not admit it even to herself, charging him with the fatal error of being "too serious."

In the meantime the affairs of the concern progressed delightfully. For the regulation fee, the Secretary of State, after some perfunctory inquiries, permitted the "Trust Company" to increase its capitalization to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Even before the certificates were delivered from the printer's, however, that month's issue of "The Friendly Hand" bore the news to the five hundred members of the Order and to four thousand five hundred prospective members, of the truly unprecedented combination of philanthropy and profit. Somewhere the indefatigable Wallingford had secured a copy of a most unusual annual statement of a large and highly successful insurance company, of the flat-rate variety and of a similar sounding name. In the smallest type to be found he had printed over this:

READ THIS REPORT OF THE PROVIDENT FRIENDS TO ITS STOCKHOLDERS

Then followed direct quotations, showing that the Provident Friends had a membership of a quarter of a million; that it had paid out in death claims an enormous amount; that it had a surplus fund expressed in a staggering array of figures; that its enrollment had increased fifty thousand within the past year. Striking sentences, such as:

WE HAVE JUST DECLARED A THIRTY PER CENT. DIVIDEND

were displayed in big, black type, the whole being spread out in such form that readers ignorant of such matters would take this to be a sworn statement of the present condition of the Order of Friendly Hands; and they were invited to subscribe for its golden stock at the rate of twenty-five dollars a share! The prudent members who were providing for their families after death could now also partic.i.p.ate in the profits of this commendable investment during life, and at a rate which, while not guaranteed, could be expected, in the light of past experience, to pay back the capital in a trifle over three years, leaving it still intact and drawing interest.

But this, dear friends and coworkers in a n.o.ble cause, was not just a hard, money-grinding proposition. The revenue derived from the sale of stock was to be expended in the further expansion of the Order, until it should blanket the world and carry the blessings of protection to the widows and orphans throughout the universe! Never before in the history of finance had it been made possible for men of modest means to further a charitable work, a n.o.ble work, a work appealing to all the highest aspirations of humanity and creditable to every finest instinct of the human heart, and at the same time to reap an enormous profit! And the price was only twenty-five dollars a share--while they lasted!

Wallingford had secured the data and supplied the human frailty ideas for this flaming announcement, but Clover had put it together, and, as he examined the proof sheet, the latter gentleman leaned back in his chair with profound self-esteem.

"That'll get 'em!" he exulted. "If that don't bring in the money to make this the greatest organization in the business, I don't want a cent!"

"You spread it on too much," objected Neil. "Why can't we do just as well or better by presenting the thing squarely? It seems to me that any man who would be caught by the self-evident buncombe of that thing would be too big a sucker to have any money."

Wallingford looked at him thoughtfully.

"You're right, in a way, Neil," he admitted. "The men who have real money wouldn't touch it, but the people we're appealing to have stacked theirs up a cent at a time, and they are afraid of all investments--even of the banks. When you offer them thirty per cent., however, they are willing to take a chance; and, after all, I don't see why, with the money that comes in from this stock sale, we should not be able to expand our organization to even larger proportions than the Provident Friends. If we do that, what is to prevent a good dividend to our stockholders?"

Clover glanced at his partner in surprise. From that overawing bulk there positively radiated high moral purpose, and Neil shriveled under it. When they were alone, Clover, making idle marks with his pencil, looked up at Wallingford from time to time from under s.h.a.ggy brows, and finally he laughed aloud.

"You're the limit," he observed. "That's a fine line of talk you gave Neil."

"Can't we buy him out?" asked Wallingford abruptly.

"What with? A note?" inquired Clover. "Hardly."