A heavy step sounded on the stairs and a hearty voice came booming down to him.

“Well, Hiram, I see you got it fixed.”

Taine jackknifed upright and stood there slightly frozen and completely speechless.

Henry Horton stood foursquarely and happily on the stairs, looking very pleased.

“I told Abbie that you wouldn’t have it done, but she said for me to come over anyway—Hey, Hiram, it’s in color! How did you do it, man?”

Taine grinned sickly. “I just got fiddling around,” he said.

Henry came down the rest of the stairs with a stately step and stood before the set, with his hands behind his back, staring at it fixedly in his best executive manner.

He slowly shook his head. “I never would have thought,” he said, “that it was possible.”

“Abbie mentioned that you wanted color.”

“Well, sure. Of course I did. But not on this old set. I never would have expected to get color on this set. How did you do it, Hiram?”

Taine told the solemn truth. “I can’t rightly say,” he said.

Henry found a nail keg standing in front of one of the benches and rolled it out in front of the old-fashioned set. He sat down warily and relaxed into solid comfort.

“That’s the way it goes,” he said. “There are men like you, but not very many of them. Just Yankee tinkerers. You keep messing around with things, trying one thing here and another there and before you know it you come up with something.”

He sat on the nail keg, staring at the set.

“It’s sure a pretty thing,” he said. “It’s better than the color they have in Minneapolis. I dropped in at a couple of the places the last time I was there and looked at the color sets. And I tell you honest, Hiram, there wasn’t one of them that was as good as this.”

Taine wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve. Somehow or other, the basement seemed to be getting warm. He was fine sweat all over.