e business; I'll buy it back for a
million: that makes two. And I'll take your note at five per cent, for
the third million. A fair offer, Mr. Graham?"

"Very liberal, indeed, Mr. Huggins," I answered.

"But I won't have anything to live on, let alone any chance to pay you
back, if you take my interest in the business away," pleaded Percy.

"I've thought of that, too," said his father, "and I'm going to give
you a job. The experience you've had in this campaign ought to make
you worth twenty-five dollars a week to us in our option department.
Then you can board at home for five dollars a week, and pay ten more
on your note. That'll leave you ten per for clothes and extras."

Percy wriggled and twisted and tried tears. Talked a lot of flip-flap
flub-doodle, but Ham was all through with the proud-popper business,
and the young man found him as full of knots as a hickory root, and
with a hide that would turn the blade of an ax.

Percy was simply in the fix of the skunk that stood on the track and
humped up his back at the lightning express--there was nothing left of
him except a deficit and the stink he'd kicked up. And a fellow can't
dictate terms with those assets. In the end he left the room with a
ring in his nose.

After all, there was more in Percy than cussedness, for when he
finally decided that it was a case of root hog or die with him, he
turned in and rooted. It took him ten years to get back into his
father's confidence and a partnership, and he was still paying on the
million-dollar note when the old man died and left him his whole
fortune. It would have been cheaper for me in the end if I had let the
old man disinherit him, because when Percy ran that Mess Pork corner
three years ago, he caught me short a pretty good line and charged me
two dollars a barrel more than any one else to settle. Explained that
he needed the money to wipe out the unpaid balance of a million-dollar
note that he'd inherited from his father.

I simply mention Percy to show why I'm a little slow to regard members
of my family as charitable institutions that I should settle
endowments on. If there's one thing I like less than another, it's
being regarded as a human meal-ticket. What is given to you always
belongs to some one else, and if the man who gave it doesn't take it
back, some fellow who doesn't have to have things given to him is apt
to come along and run away with it. But what you earn is your own, and
apt to return you