CHAPTER VI.
WAITING AT THE STATION.
Men bustling their way to the lunch counter; old women fidgeting in the fear that they had forgotten something; man in blue crying the destination of outgoing trains; weary mothers striving to soothe their fretful children; the tumult raised by cabmen that were crowding against the border-line of privilege; bells, shrieks, new harshnesses here and there; confusion everywhere--a railway station in Chicago.
"The train ought to be here now," said George Witherspoon, looking at his watch.
"Do you know exactly what train he is coming on ?" his wife asked.
"Yes; he telegraphed again from Memphis." "You didn't tell me you'd got another telegram." "My dear, I thought I did.

The truth is that I've been so rushed and stirred up for the last day or so that I've hardly known what I was about." "And I can scarcely realize now what I'm waiting for," said a young woman.

"Mother, you look as if you haven't slept any for a week." "And I don't feel as if I have." George Witherspoon, holder of the decisive note in the affairs of that great department store known as "The Colossus," may not by design have carried an air that would indicate the man to whom small tradesman regarded it as a mark of good breeding to cringe, but even in a place where his name was not known his appearance would strongly have appealed to commercial confidence.

That instinct which in earlier life had prompted fearless speculation, now crystalized into conscious force, gave unconscious authority to his countenance.

He was tall and with so apparent a strength in his shoulders as to suggest the thought that with them he had shoved his way to success.