something easy and sufficient about him. He did not appear to be in the
least flustered or disturbed. He knew how to keep books, he said, though
he knew nothing of the details of the grain and commission business. It
was interesting to him. He would like to try it.

"I like that fellow," Henry Waterman confided to his brother the moment
Frank had gone with instructions to report the following morning.
"There's something to him. He's the cleanest, briskest, most alive thing
that's walked in here in many a day."

"Yes," said George, a much leaner and slightly taller man, with
dark, blurry, reflective eyes and a thin, largely vanished growth of
brownish-black hair which contrasted strangely with the egg-shaped
whiteness of his bald head. "Yes, he's a nice young man. It's a wonder
his father don't take him in his bank."

"Well, he may not be able to," said his brother. "He's only the cashier
there."

"That's right."

"Well, we'll give him a trial. I bet anything he makes good. He's a
likely-looking youth."

Henry got up and walked out into the main entrance looking into Second
Street. The cool cobble pavements, shaded from the eastern sun by the
wall of buildings on the east--of which his was a part--the noisy trucks
and drays, the busy crowds hurrying to and fro, pleased him. He looked
at the buildings over the way--all three and four stories, and largely
of gray stone and crowded with life--and thanked his stars that he
had originally located in so prosperous a neighborhood. If he had only
brought more property at the time he bought this!

"I wish that Cowperwood boy would turn out to be the kind of man I
want," he observed to himself, meditatively. "He could save me a lot of
running these days."

Curiously, after only three or four minutes of conversation with the
boy, he sensed this marked quality of efficiency. Something told him he
would do well.

Chapter IV

The appearance of Frank Cowperwood at this time was, to say the least,
prepossessing and satisfactory. Nature had destined him to be about five
feet ten inches tall. His head was large, shapely, notably commercial in
aspect, thickly covered with crisp, dark-brown hair and fixed on a pair
of square shoulders and a stocky body. Already his eyes had the look
that subtle years of thought bring. They were inscrutable. You could
tell nothing by his eyes. He walked with a light, confident, springy
step. Life had given him no severe shocks nor rud