impetuousness into his former partner's room. Stacy, already deeply
absorbed in other business, was sitting with his back towards him, and
Barker's arms were actually encircling his neck before the astonished
and half-angry man looked up. But when his eyes met the laughing gray
ones of Barker above him he gently disengaged himself with a quick
return of the caress, rose, shut the door of an inner office, and
returning pushed Barker into an armchair in quite the old suppressive
fashion of former days. Yes; it was the same Stacy that Barker looked
at, albeit his brown beard was now closely cropped around his determined
mouth and jaw in a kind of grave decorum, and his energetic limbs
already attuned to the rigor of clothes of fashionable cut and still
more rigorous sombreness of color.

"Barker boy," he began, with the familiar twinkle in his keen eyes which
the younger partner remembered, "I don't encourage stag dancing among my
young men during bank hours, and you'll please to remember that we are
not on Heavy Tree Hill"--

"Where," broke in Barker enthusiastically, "we were only overlooked by
the Black Spur Range and the Sierran snow-line; where the nearest voice
that came to you was quarter of a mile away as the crow flies and nearly
a mile by the trail."

"And was generally an oath!" said Stacy. "But you're in San Francisco
NOW. Where are you stopping?" He took up a pencil and held it over a
memorandum pad awaitingly.

"At the Brook House. It's"--

"Hold on! 'Brook House,'" Stacy repeated as he jotted it down. "And for