RECREATION’S ADVERTISER 

assurance of large profits. This he did and one 
day when he had cleared a hundred thousand 
for a month’s efforts, the clerk went into his 
desk and the following conversation ensued, 
according to the colonel’s gleeful relation of it 
many times thereafter. : 
‘Colonel, I thought I would come in to see 
you about something that concerns Miss Mil- 
dred’s future.” 
‘You just let her alone, young man, and the 
devil will lose his best means of harming her 
future.” 
“Well, J am interested in this, too. What 
right have J to allow you to fail to protect the 
future of the girl lam going to marry? Suppose 
you shot me in a moment of self forgetful- 
ness some day, as you have said you might do. 
Suppose business reverses and your being 
hanged should leave her penniless % 
“You audacious little cub ” gasped the 
nearly speechless colonel. 
“T may be audacious but those are cold facts, 
and I have come to ask you to take out a life- 
insurance policy in my company.” 
When the old banker had recovered from his 
rage, the whimsical humor and certain salt of 
sense in the situation appealed to him strongly 
and recalling the youngster he authorized him 
to procure a policy for $5,000. The examiner 
found Grier to be a good risk. He was written 
up and more as a joke than anything else signed 
it over jointly to the young lover and his 
daughter, telling them they might have a basket 
picnicand a month’s house party if they should 
come into the money by his demise. It was all 
done in his capricious jocular way. 
A few months went by and again the wheel 
of fortune had turned up for the colonel in still 
more extended tobacco speculations and one 
day the young man broached the subject of 
increasing the amount of the policy. 
One of the colonel’s oldest friends Judge Sam 
Tucker was sitting with him swapping tales of 
their boyhood and both were in rare spirits. 
The visitor asked to see the policy, read it care- 
fully, and then said: 
‘Denby, I never saw one of these before, but 
I tell you it is a fine thing. You can do it. 
Build it up to $50,000 for the three girls. You 
are taking long chances on everything else. 
Give them a little protection.” 
“By George, I’ll do it, Judge Sam,” answered 
the colonel with a bang of his fist on the desk, 
and he did. 
Raymond was handling the New York end of 
the successive deals that were being put through 
in tobacco by his brother-in-law, and spurred 
on by Raymond’s boldness the colonel went 
farther and farther afield in his operations. The 
little bank and the farming business of his 


numerous tracts became very minor matters 
indeed. The people of the South were begin- 
ning to call Col. Denby Grier, the ‘Virginia 
Tobacco . King,”’ when suddenly the scene 
changed. 
The spring of the year following the increase 
of the policy, the New York stock market turned 
on Raymond to pay up its old scores of raiding 
he had perpetrated upon it. His enemies saw 
he was hit and gathered together their full forces 
to batter and crush him if they could. In two 
weeks he was crippled. In a month he was 
approaching a crisis, and early in June he took 
train one Saturday after the close of the Ex- 
change and hurried away to Virginia for a 
Sunday morning conference with Colonel G rier, 
who had not known thus far that Raymond was 
in any real danger. 
It was a morning that I shall never forget. 
The beauty of the valley, clean washed by a 
heavy rain the night before, was that radiance of 
yellow sunshine, that white flecked. blue sky 
and those stretches of brilliant varying green 
with white houses picked out among it, 
which have made June in that region famous. 
All the flowers but the tardy roses were in full 
bloom; the peonies made the terraces before the 
hill house seem one enormous burst of color 
hurled on a green velvet tapestry. The quiet 
of the Sabbath lay brooding over the town, and 
coming up the hill were little groups of neigh- 
bors returning from church. Mrs. Raymond 
had been staying with the Griers for the month 
and she and the girls with some friends were 
just turning into the gate when she caught sight 
of her husband’s white face as he and the 
colonel, standing before an upper window, saw 
our party and turned away to come down. 
Instinctively she ran a little way up the walk to 
the wide open door within which we could see 
the double stair and its old-fashioned turn and 
landing. 
Vividly, as if it were an hour ago, I see the 
two men, so different in type, so utterly un- 
like in life, descending the steps, care and 
anxiety written on every feature of their faces. 
Just at the landing, the colonel reeled, caught 
feebly at the rail, pitched forward as Raymond 
cried out in horror and caught vainly at his arm, 
and came crashing down the flight to lie bleed- 
ing and dead across his own threshold. 
Still in my mind’s eye I see the hurrying 
figures, hear the bitter cries of anguish, and 
watch the startled neighbors coming to tender 
their aid to the stricken household. Leaning 
against one of the pillars, looking off across the 
far hills of the old state, stood Raymond, his 
face like white clay and every line of his mouth 
and jaw so changed that I knew Fate held the 
victory over him. 
