l the traffic can bear." He
saw all men in the business game doing this.

One day, in a mellow mood (induced by a string of cocktails and a
hearty lunch), he started a conversation with Jones, the elevator boy.
Jones was a slender, mop-headed, man-grown, truculent flame of an
individual who seemed to go out of his way to insult his passengers.
It was this that attracted Daylight's interest, and he was not long in
finding out what was the matter with Jones. He was a proletarian,
according to his own aggressive classification, and he had wanted to
write for a living. Failing to win with the magazines, and compelled
to find himself in food and shelter, he had gone to the little valley
of Petacha, not a hundred miles from Los Angeles. Here, toiling in the
day-time, he planned to write and study at night. But the railroad
charged all the traffic would bear. Petacha was a desert valley, and
produced only three things: cattle, fire-wood, and charcoal. For
freight to Los Angeles on a carload of cattle the railroad charged
eight dollars. This, Jones explained, was due to the fact that the
cattle had legs and could be driven to Los Angeles at a cost equivalent
to the charge per car load. But firewood had no legs, and the railroad
charged just precisely twenty-four dollars a carload.

This was a fine adjustment, for by working hammer-and-tongs through a
twelve-hour day, after freight had been deducted from the selling price
of the wood in Los Angeles, the wood-chopper received one dollar and
sixty cents. Jones had thought to get ahead of the game by turning his
wood into charcoal. His estimates were satisfactory. But the railroad
also made estimates. It issued a rate of forty-two dollars a car on
charcoal. At the end of three months, Jones went over his figures, and
found that he was still making one dollar and sixty cents a day.

"So I quit," Jones concluded. "I went hobbling for a year, and I got
back at the railroads. Leaving out the little things, I came across
the Sierras in the summer and touched a match to the snow-sheds. They
only had a little thirty-thousand-dollar fire. I guess that squared up
all balances due on Petacha."

"Son, ain't you afraid to be turning loose such information?" Daylight
gravely demanded.

"Not on your life," quoth Jones. "They can't prove it. You could say
I said so, and I could say I didn't say so, and a hell of a lot that
evidence would amount to with a jury."

Daylight