Fitz. He rushed into the office, caught up the blue bundle and the
map, nearly upsetting the colonel, who was balanced back in his chair
with his long legs over the desk,--a favorite attitude when down
town,--rushed out, and returned in half an hour with a fat body
surmounted by a bald head fringed about with gray curls.

[Illustration]

He was the advance agent of that mysterious combination known to the
financial world as an "English syndicate," an elusive sort of commercial
sea-serpent with its head in London and its tail around the globe. The
"inquiry" which had so gladdened the colonel's heart the morning ofthe
breakfast with aunt Nancy had proceeded from this rotund negotiator.

The colonel had, as usual, started the road at Cartersville, and had
gotten as far as the double-span iron bridge over the Tench when the
rotund gentleman asked abruptly,--

"How far are you from a coal-field?"

The colonel lifted the point of his pen, adjusted his glasses, and
punched a hole in the rumpled map within a hair's breadth of a black
dot labeled "Cartersville."

"Right there, suh. Within a stone's throw of our locomotives."

Fitz looked into the hole with as much astonishment as if it were the
open mouth of the mine itself.

"Hard or soft?" said the stout man.