veins—who spout statistics about German efficiency, meaning by that darnnable word a comparison between what's best in Germany with what's worst in America. I hate both breeds, I'm an American. No. I am not sorry that I wasn't born over here. If I had been, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate so thoroughly what America is, and means, and does."
To-day Martin Wedekind was retired from active business affairs and spent his time between his home in Lincoln Addition and the Club, where he played his afternoon game of cards or dominoes and took his whiskey straight, like a native born. His wife was a New England woman and he had an only child, a daughter. He was a little on the autumn side of fifty, tall, heavy, slightly stooped, with peering, twinkling, kindly eyes, a mass of close-curled hair, a thick, graying mustache, and great hairy hands that he used freely to gesticulate with.
He did so this afternoon when the Club steward announced Tom Graves, whom he had met the year before on a visit to the owner of the Killicott ranch. At that time an impromptu friendship had sprung up between the two men in spite of their difference in age and fortune and, at least on Tom's side, not altogether hindered by the fact that Bertha, Martin Wedekind's daughter, was blond and violet-eyed and straight of limb.
"Hullo, Tom! Hullo, capitalist!" was his hearty greeting as the young Westerner ambled into the room with that peculiar, straddling, side-wheeling walk which smacked of stock saddle and rolling prairie.
Tom grinned sheepishly as he sat down. "I guess the news of the rich strike in the Yankee Doodle Glory is all over town by this time?" he asked.
