"An' paid thirty-five thousand for a coat that runs half a dozen shades
lighter, an' is topped an' pointed to bring it up to the best it's got.
Did I ever tell ye the story of Mrs. Orcutt's coat?"

"No."

"It goes back quite a ways--the left-handed love me an' Fred Orcutt has
for one another. We speak neighborly on the street, an' for years
we've played on opposite sides of a ball-a-hole foursome at the Country
Club, but either of us would sooner lose a hundred dollars than pay the
other a golf ball.

"It come about in a business way, an' in a business way it's kept on.
Not a dollar of McNabb money passes through the hands of Orcutt's
Wolverine Bank--an' he could have had it all, an' he knows it.

"As ye know, I started out, a lad, with the Hudson's Bay Company, an'
I'd got to be a factor when an old uncle of my mother's in Scotlan'
died an' left me a matter of twenty thousand pounds sterling. When I
got the money I quit the Company an' drifted around a bit until finally
I bought up a big tract of Michigan pine. There wasn't any Terrace
City then. I located a sawmill here at the mouth of the river an' it
was known as McNabb's Landin'.

"D'ye see those docks? I built 'em, an' I've seen the time when they
was two steamers warped along each side of 'em, an' one acrost the end,
an' a half a dozen more anchored in the harbor waitin' to haul McNabb's
lumber. The van stood on this spot in the sawmill days, an' when it
got too small I built a wooden store. Folks began driftin' in. They
changed the name from McNabb's Landin' to Terrace City, an' I turned a