m as
I planned. On the contrary, I received from him, a few days before the
paper's removal, a silly and characteristic note: "Since the freak grass
has been stopped it seems indicated other abnormalities be terminated
also. Your usefulness to this paper, always debatable, is now clearly at
an end. As of this moment your putative services will be no longer
required. W.R.L."

Bitter vexation came over me at having lost the opportunity to give this
bully a piece of my mind and my impulse was to go immediately to his
office and tell him I scorned his petty paycheck, but I reflected a man
of his nature would merely find some tricky way of turning the interview
to his malicious satisfaction and he would know soon enough it was the
paper which was suffering a loss and not I.

I started next morning and drove eastward toward my property, quite
satisfied to leave behind forever the scenes of my early struggles. The
West had given me only petty irritations. In the East, with its older
culture and higher level of intelligence, I looked forward to having my
worth appreciated.

FOUR

_Man Triumphant ... II_

_36._ Everything I had visualized in the broker's office turned out too
pessimistically accurate. Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates
was nothing but a mailing address in one of the most forlorn of
Manhattan buildings, long before jettisoned by the tide of commerce. The
factory, no bigger than a very small house, was a brokenwindowed affair
whose solid brick construction alone saved it from total demolition at
the playful hands of the local children. The roof had long since fallen
in and symbolical grass and weeds had pushed their way through cracks in
the floor to flourish in a sickly and surreptitious way.

The whole concern, until my stock purchase, had been the chattel and
creature of one Button Gwynnet Fles. In appearance he was such a genuine
Yankee, lean and sharp, with a slight stoop and prying eyes, that one
quite expected a straw to protrude from between his thin lips or have
him draw from his pocket a wooden nutmeg and offer it for sale. After
getting to know him I learned this apparent shrewdness was a pure
defense mechanism, that he was really an artless and ingenuous soul who
had been taught by other hands the swindle he practiced for many years
and had merely continued it because he knew no way of making an honest
living. He was, like myself, unattached, and disarmed whatever lingering
s