f he had had a call to leather. He was a tall, spare New Englander,
with one of those knobby foreheads which has been pushed out by the
overcrowding of the brain, or bulged by the thickening of the skull,
according as you like or dislike the man. His manners were easy or
familiar by the same standard. He told me right at the start that, while
he didn't know just what he wanted to do, he was dead sure that it
wasn't the leather business. It seemed that he had said the same thing
to his father and that the old man had answered, "Tut, tut," and told
him to forget it and to learn hides.

Simpkins learned all that he wanted to know about the packing industry
in thirty days, and I learned all that I wanted to know about Ezra in
the same time. Pork-packing seemed to be the only thing that he wasn't
interested in. I got his resignation one day just five minutes before
the one which I was having written out for him was ready; for I will do
Simpkins the justice to say that there was nothing slow about him. He
and his father split up, temporarily, over it, and, of course, it cost
me the old man's trade and friendship. I want to say right here that the
easiest way in the world to make enemies is to hire friends.

I lost sight of Simpkins for a while, and then he turned up at the
office one morning as friendly and familiar as ever. Said he was a
reporter and wanted to interview me on the December wheat deal. Of
course, I wouldn't talk on that, but I gave him a little fatherly
advice--told him he would sleep in a hall bedroom all his life if he
didn't quit his foolishness and go back to his father, though I didn't
really believe it. He thanked me and went off and wrote a column about
what I might have said about December wheat, and somehow gave the
impression that I had said it.

The next I heard of Simpkins he was dead. The Associated Press
dispatches announced it, the Cuban Junta confirmed it, and last of all,
a long dispatch from Simpkins himself detailed the circumstances leading
up to the "atrocity," as the headlines in his paper called it.

I got a long wire from Ezra's father asking me to see the managing editor
and get at the facts for him. It seemed that the paper had thought a heap
of Simpkins, and that he had been sent out to Cuba as a correspondent, and
stationed with the Insurgent army. Simpkins in Cuba had evidently lived up
to the reputation of Simpkins in Chicago. When there was any news he sent
it, and when there