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 Sam was thoughtful. "If anything should go wrong. . . . Mind, I'm not saying it will; I think the Christmas trade will make us a big winner. But if anything should go wrong, and Clud sells these few things in the store, where's he going to get the balance of his $175?"

"Tom Woods said he knew where he could get it or he'd never have let us have the money."

Sam digested this. "Going home to supper?" he asked.

"No; I'll telephone my mother."

"All right. I'll get a breath of air. I want to think this over."

An hour later Sam was back. There was about him a triumphant air of cunning and craft, a pride in his own astuteness, an atmosphere of trium* phant foxiness that Bert had never quite noticed before.

"Look here," Sam began, "you've been saving most of your five dollars a week, haven't you?"

"Yes."

"And I've got a little private bank account of my own. I didn't put everything I had into this business. I guess Clud knows that; he's got to have a way of finding out things in his game. He figures that when the time comes he'll get what's coming to him by going after what we have in the bank in our own private accounts. Well, I'm going to fool him. I'm going to take my money out of this bank and go to the city and put it in a