He leaned back to breathe. In business, at any rate, he was no longer a hell-paver—except—unless—
He had drawn no more than one breath of this blessed relief, however, before his mind had fastened on the single ground for business apprehension which remained—the fifteen per cent—the fifteen thousand shares he had been forced to part with, thereby jeopardizing his control. He had money enough now to buy it, but Templeton would not sell. George went into the market to buy a different fifteen thousand shares or any part of them, but Judson-Morris stock was all at once strangely retiring. It had practically disappeared. This meant that somebody was buying it. For what?
There could be but one reason. George was sick as he thought what this reason was. It would be terrible if they took the plant away from him now—now, just as he had made it into the great, solid structure that it was. It was all he had left—except a hope that turned toward Europe. This hope and that fear seemed all that remained to him, and it was while he shifted his eyes dizzily from one to the other and back again, that the United States rushed suddenly headlong into the world war. Instantly George Judson roused to a new possibility.
The Judson-Morris Motor Works no longer required his presence, It would run now of its
