"Nonsense--Ho! ho!" Simon Slade laughed outright. "The richest
man! You forget Judge Hammond."

"No, not even Judge Hammond, with all deference for our clever
friend Willy," and Judge Lyman smiled pleasantly on the young man.

"If he gets richer, somebody will be poorer!" The individual who
tittered these words had not spoken before, and I turned to look
at him more closely. A glance showed him to be one of a class seen
in all bar-rooms; a poor, broken-down inebriate, with the inward
power of resistance gone--conscious of having no man's respect,
and giving respect to none. There was a shrewd twinkle in his
eyes, as he fixed them on Slade, that gave added force to the
peculiar tone in which his brief but telling sentence was uttered.
I noticed a slight contraction on the landlord's ample forehead,
the first evidence I had yet seen of ruffled feelings. The remark,
thrown in so untimely (or timely, some will say), and with a kind
of prophetic malice, produced a temporary pause in the
conversation. No one answered or questioned the intruder, who, I
could perceive, silently enjoyed the effect of his words. But soon
the obstructed current ran on again.

"If our excellent friend, Mr. Slade," said Harvey Green, "is not
the richest man in Cedarville at the end of ten years, he will at
least enjoy the satisfaction of having made his town richer."

"A true word that," replied Judge Lyman--"as true a word as ever
was spoken. What a dead-and-alive place this has been until within
the last few months. All vigorous growth had stopped, and we were
actually going to seed."