learning what the state of the flour market was, and offering his
surplus at the very rate he would have expected to get for it if
there had been no prospective glut. Did they want to buy for immediate
delivery (forty-eight hours being immediate) six hundred barrels of
prime flour? He would offer it at nine dollars straight, in the barrel.
They did not. He offered it in fractions, and some agreed to take one
portion, and some another. In about an hour he was all secure on this
save one lot of two hundred barrels, which he decided to offer in one
lump to a famous operator named Genderman with whom his firm did no
business. The latter, a big man with curly gray hair, a gnarled and
yet pudgy face, and little eyes that peeked out shrewdly through fat
eyelids, looked at Cowperwood curiously when he came in.

"What's your name, young man?" he asked, leaning back in his wooden
chair.

"Cowperwood."

"So you work for Waterman & Company? You want to make a record, no
doubt. That's why you came to me?"

Cowperwood merely smiled.

"Well, I'll take your flour. I need it. Bill it to me."

Cowperwood hurried out. He went direct to a firm of brokers in Walnut
Street, with whom his firm dealt, and had them bid in the grain he
needed at prevailing rates. Then he returned to the office.

"Well," said Henry Waterman, when he reported, "you did that quick. Sold
old Genderman two hundred barrels direct, did you? That's doing pretty
well. He isn't on our books, is he?"

"No, sir."

"I thought not. Well, if you can do that sort of work on the street you
won't be on the books long."

Thereafter, in the course of time, Frank became a familiar figure in
the commission district and on 'change (the Produce Exchange), striking
balances for his employer, picking up odd lots of things they needed,
soliciting new customers, breaking gluts by disposing of odd lots
in unexpected quarters. Indeed the Watermans were astonished at
his facility in this respect. He had an uncanny faculty for getting
appreciative hearings, making friends, being introduced into new realms.
New life began to flow through the old channels of the Waterman company.
Their customers were better satisfied. George was for sending him out
into the rural districts to drum up trade, and this was eventually done.

Near Christmas-time Henry said to George: "We'll have to make Cowperwood
a liberal present. He hasn't any salary. How would five hundred dollars
do?"

"That's p