Birch had gone into the game just for the love of a fight, and bets were made on him down at the American House and in barbershops. At the noon hour knots of men would stop to peer in the window and see how much the hand on the "clock" had moved since morning.

On May sixth a third of the time had gone, and the record showed that the lighting department had jumped past the power department in actual kilowatt measurement of new connected business. The meter department had been doubled, and the line department had more men than had ever been on the payroll. The president had never sent a word to Jimmy except a memorandum saying that the engineering, line, wiring, and meter departments would be equipped to take care of any increase in sales. Jimmy crumpled it up in his square fist

and threw it into the metal waste-basket. "Don't you see?" he complained. "Of course we might win at this rate. But summer is coming on. People go away. Business slows down. The need for light is less,

and any fool knows we've been getting the easiest prospects first. The first of this fight is cream; the last of it is skimmed milk."

"By the way," said Wheeler, the youngest

solicitor, "the boss's daughter came in this morning to look at our clock."

"Did, eh?" said Jimmy, staring off through a matched-board varnished wall. "What she say?"

"I don't know.

What does anybody

care? I saw her yesterday, too, with a new gown, a new driving horse, a new trap, and a new man."

"You better see your customers," said J. B., bringing his mouth into a thin slit.

By June the "clock" began to fall behind. The men in the commercial department looked tired when they came in mornings. Jimmy's fight for business was no longer news, and the papers mentioned it no more. The summer go-aways began to drift out of town, and business grew dull. Men who had bet on the race began to regret their haste. Jimmy came back from his excursions to see new prospects with a scowl, and sat at his desk looking over the new contracts or went down to the service men and cursed them softly for their slowness as to "cutting-in" new customers. He was not at his best. His eyes were dark, his shoulders drooped. Jimmy had worked hard in his short life, and somehow, though we did not know the inside story of this battle, we felt that it represented the climax of his "drive," and that it had done something to break his spirit; we believed that he would be a bad loser, and would resent bitterly the fact that responsibility to accomplish a miracle had been thrust upon him so that a defeat would have to be written on his record.

That first week in June Naomi Sutton came in to the department when he was out. She wanted a new part for a copper coffee-percolator, and several of the men jumped forward to wait on her. She was the daughter of the president of the company and, besides, her eyes were like trout pools and her hair was like the blackbird's wing, and her movements were those of a young nymph in tennis clothes, and there did not seem to be a serious thought in her head.

"What does that mean?" she asked Jones, pointing to the woeful showing on the clock. "Does that mean you men are going to lose? I should think you'd be ashamedto try and fail. How many of those spaces will you be short of making the hand finish its journey?"

Jones tried to tell her. But she said she

could only feel a buzz in her head when she tried to understand electrical terms, and she laughed merrily and went away. Her picture was in the Sunday edition of the Ledger in the society columns, and the head stenographer sneered at it. Of course it may have been that the head stenographer had become infected with the general illtemper of the office.

On Friday, however, as if Fate had wished to pick Jimmy up so that he might be knocked down again, a marvelous creature came in and, with a forty bull-power bass voice, asked to see Mr. Birch. The stranger wore a club-check, black-and-white suit over his ponderous body, a brown derby hat, a pair of tortoise-shell eye-glasses, and a whole set of gold teeth. He looked like Nero and talked like a patent-medicine man. His name was Atkins Atkinson and, having announced that his business was confidential, he whispered it to Jimmy in words which rattled the calendars on the walls and sounded like the peroration at a political rally.

"I'm a man of few words, Mr. Birch," he said. "I'm a man of action. My business is amusement parks, booking agency for summer attractions and carnival management. I'm the famous Atkinson Chain of El Dorado White Cities, Incorporated, and in ten minutes yesterday I decided to build one of our White City amusement parks on the site of your abandoned race-track on the Bayberry car-line, and in ten minutes I bought the site, and in ten minutes I had started orders for more feet of lumber than I dare to tell you for fear you'd call for smelling-salts. I've got a partner in this by the name of I. M. Oan of Cedar Rapids and New York City. He's on the financial end, and I'm the producer. We're good and sound, and we want to talk turkey on lighting the new park."

"Great guns! The miracle!" yelled Jimmy. "Here, don't move! Let me get a drink of this spring water. How much current will you use? But I don't have to ask. It's enough! When can you take it?"

"Ah-h-h!" said the Fog Horn. "There's the question. We're in a race against time. We want to open the Fourth with a big firework display that will put your eye out, and Daring Diana, a woman on a bicycle who rides an incline, drops forty feet, lands on a springboard, dives off the bicycle and into a tank of water covered with blazing

gasoline, twenty-four feet six inches from the end of the board. But to open the Fourth will mean a gang of carpenters that could turn out a new house about twice a day. Any slip in a consignment of spruce boards or white paint would put us on the bum."

"I'll contract to give you service July third," said Jimmy. "We'll keep our word. Here, sign this."

"Not on your life!" the Atkinson person replied. "What kind of a fluff would I be to promise to take your juice when maybe I couldn't do anything with it but dump it on the marshes! Suppose we weren't ready on July fourth? Send me estimates, rates, and so on. We're thinking of putting in an electric plant of our own anyhow."

"See here!" exclaimed poor J. B., snatching at the other's sleeve. "There isn't a Chinaman's chance for that. How good are your prospects of opening on the Fourth?"

"Two out of five," replied the other. "And, say-I never seen a man so anxious for business."

"Anxious?" groaned Jimmy. "You fellers may save my neck. You'll have our figures to-morrow! Then there's nearly a month left!"

That was a terrible month for Jimmy. He called his men together and told them that if they would keep up their end for thirty days more, he might have a piece of business which would pull out a victory for the department.

"Some of you men may find out what piece of business I refer to, because I'm going to order the pole-line extension for it on my own risk to-day. But if you find out, keep your mouths shut. We'll open the eyes of the big fellows up-stairs. And the town will drop dead from surprise."

The next day he went out on the Bayberry line. A gang of men, four scrapers, three dump-carts, a steam rock-crusher, and an engineering party were already at work on the old race-track.

"What's going on here?" he asked of the conductor.

"Nobody knows," said the other. "They say it's going to be a big brewery."

Jimmy went back to town. For seven days after that he tried to find Atkins Atkinson, and for seven days he went out in one of the company's machines to watch the lumber being brought in and stacked on

the Central's siding and then cut in lengths on a steam sawmill which had come in the night like a piece of machinery wished into being. Finally he met Atkinson on the grounds.

"Sign up a contract on the figures we sent?" he asked. "Then we'll start to put our service out this way."

"You're doing it already," said the observant promoter. "That's your pole line, isn't it? Well, we'll do our own wiring in the park, and it ought to take you only four hours to run your current on to our system. Come around and see us July second or third. I'll talk to my partner, Mr. Oan, the next time the chance comes when we're not too busy. Until then, my friend, until then

Jimmy almost burst into tears. He was on the verge of telling his story to the Fog Horn, but he went away kicking at lumps of mud as he walked. He tried to whistle, and there was not a whistle left behind his dry lips.

He knew that nothing but a connection of the big load in the amusement park could save him from failure in his fight. It has been said that he used to go out at his lunch hour during the last days of June with a sandwich and peanuts in a paper bag and sit on an old stone wall under the sprawling, scraggly apple-trees on Bayberry Hill at half-past one, and look down at the work going on at the park, listening to the sound of hammers on the boards, watching the blanket of paint crawl along the high walls, watching men in overalls making tests in the roller-coaster cars and the steam-shovels still digging in the hole which Atkinson had called the "Big Lagoon."

Jimmy would hurl down imprecations on the laborers for their slowness. He saw a dozen cases in which he could have suggested better methods. He gnawed his thumb and finally, disgusted with the idea that the park would not be finished in time, he would throw himself on his back in the grass and, looking up, would watch a catbird scold him from the edge of her nest.

It was not till June thirtieth that Atkinson came to see him again.

"We're going to open the Fourth of July," the Fog Horn announced, rubbing his massive knees. "Modern methods done itthe methods of the Atkinson Chain. Get me?"

"Get you!" exclaimed Jimmy, propping himself up on his desk, with tears in his voice. "Get you? Sure I get you. Here's the contract. Sign it. Sign it and I'll put a gang on out there metering that will work till morning."

"Oh, I can't sign the contract," said the big man, waving Jimmy upward toward the ceiling as if he weighed nothing. "We have a system in all our business. My partner financed this enterprise and my partner signs the papers."

"When'll he be here?"

"The second of the month. You can come out there to the Park at eleven in the morning."

"Will he be there sure?"

"Yep," said the Fog Horn. "We do business that way-minute by minute. Don't forget. Eleven-Tuesday."

Forget? Not Jimmy. He had a contract in his pocket which, signed, would win his fight!

Tuesday morning at nine o'clock for the first time in nearly three months, Jimmy went up to the president's office.

"Hello, Jim," said the old man cordially. "You've put up a game fight, my boy. Didn't know you'd do it. But you're going to lose."

"So they say," said J. B.

"Look here," the old man began suddenly after he had stared out of the window. "Look here! By George, you've shown the stuff in you! You got a mean deal from me. I haven't been watching your fight closely, but I've done some thinking. This is man to man. We're living in America. You were right, merit does count. Oldfashioned standards still hold good, and blamed if I'm going to let 'em go down. If you can win Naomi, that goes with me, Jimmy."

"Not exactly," replied J. B., looking the president straight in the eye. "I want no favors just this minute. I'll want 'em a heap later, but not now."

"What?" asked the old man.

"I'm going to win," said Jimmy. "I'm going to connect up every watt of business I started out to put on our lines. That's what I came up to say. When I win, I win."

The President of the Union Light, Heat & Power Company gasped, looked angry, laughed, and buried his face in the mail.

He did not believe that Jimmy had a chance.

Indeed, even then J. B. was white with anxiety. He took the car out to Bayberry and spent the quarter-hour stamping on the front platform.

"Just my luck to find the place afire," he said.

"How's that?" said the motorman. "Oh, nothing," replied Jimmy.

But the park had not burned down. Atkinson was there, directing a scene painter who was coloring the peaks of the "Alps for a Nickel" and chatting with Daring Diana, otherwise Margaret Nelligan of Salt Lake and formerly in circus work.

"Hello, Birch," said he. "We're putting on the last touches."

"Where's your partner?" gasped Jimmy, filled with suspicion.

"Oh, yes, that's right, you want your contract signed," Atkinson said with irritating coolness. "Here, see them appletrees up by that stone wall? Gone up there behind them trees. Stroll up."

Stroll was a terrible word just then. Jimmy ran. He almost ran toward the place where, in his agony, he had so often watched the workers below on the site of the old race-track.

No one was under the apple-trees but Naomi.

"Hello," said she. "Who are you looking for, Jimmy Birch?"

"The partner-the man who built the park-the owner," Jimmy panted. "I'm the owner, Jimmy," said she. "I built the park."

"You built the park?"

"I had to, didn't I? I heard dad tell mother about his bargain. And you had to have so many more what-ever-you-call-ems of connected business to win, didn't you? Well, a park was the only thing I thought I'd like. So I just spent the money for a park. You're not angry?"

"Angry?" Jimmy cried. "Angry?"

"Because it only cost seventy-five thousand dollars, and that is nothing but money," said she. "And I spent it for us."

That one last word paid Jimmy in full. He stood there with her hands in his, conscious that the world eternally proves itself sound and kind.

"Oh, gee!" said he at last. "Won't I be able to work up some great lighting effects for people now!"

OULDN'T it be fine if some one

could write

up his very first experience of Riding on the Cars? All the impressions that so marvelous an event should have made upon him, vivid, clear, and convincing-so that the reader might sense it as if he too were Riding on the Cars for the first time. Wouldn't it be fine!

You try an old, old person. Aw my, yes, she minds as plain as if 'twas only yesterday the time the first railroad train came through their town. Back in York State it was.

"Crowds and crowds of people, eh?" "Aw my, yes! Like General Training Day it was. Sam bought me gingerbread." "Weren't you excited?"

"Aw my, yes! That was a big day for me. I had on a pair o' plum-colored satin shoes that Sam made himself and gave me. That was the first time I had 'em on. Out o' the house, that is."

"And did you ride on the cars that day?" "Yes, indeed. Sam took me. That was the first time I ever went with him any place on a ja'nt, that is."

"And didn't it seem strange to you to ride that way-no horses pulling?"

"I d'know's I thought much about that.