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 your good twenty-five to thirty dollars a week some day!"

It also slips out, while Judy fidgets and coughs, that Mrs. Willcox's a hundred dollars shy on a note held by the bank and due in a week. How she's going to get the century is something she don't know. This bothers me not the little, and I am thinking is there any way I could scare up that hundred bucks short of burglary and get it to that dear old lady without her knowing who sent it, when the doorbell rings. Judy seems glad of the interruption to her mother's hard-luck story and runs to the door.

Mrs. Willcox peeps out the window through the curtains.

"Why, it's Mr. Dempster!" she says in a pleased voice.

I liked to fall out of my chair! What is this fathead doing around here after what just happened at the lake? And "Mister" Dempster! This big stiff's only about my age—but he's "Mister" and I'm just Gale. Still, if money gets a fellow attention in Wall Street, why shouldn't it in Drew City?

Judy walks in ahead of Rags without saying a word. She looks meaningly at me and then back to Rags, very stern and cold.

"Well?" she says to him, eighty below zero.

But with Mrs. Willcox, it's different! She runs and grabs Rags's hat and coat and pushes a worn chair back of the curtains on the sly, and generally acts as flustered as if Rags was the Prince from Wales. This gets Judy's goat and ruins my animal, especially when