nd, if he has
anyone. He may have, you know. If there is a real opening I'll speak of
you. We'll see."

Eugene went away once more, very grateful. He was thinking that Dula had
always meant good luck to him. He had taken his first important drawing.
The pictures he had published for him had brought him the favor of M.
Charles. Dula had secured him the position that he now had. Would he be
the cause of his getting this one?

On the way down town on the car he encountered a cross-eyed boy. He had
understood from someone recently that cross-eyed boys were good
luck--cross-eyed women bad luck. A thrill of hopeful prognostication
passed over him. In all likelihood he was going to get this place. If
this sign came true this time, he would believe in signs. They had come
true before, but this would be a real test. He stared cheerfully at the
boy and the latter looked him full in the eyes and grinned.

"That settles it!" said Eugene. "I'm going to get it."

Still he was far from being absolutely sure.

CHAPTER XXXII

The Summerfield Advertising Agency, of which Mr. Daniel
C. Summerfield was president, was one of those curious exfoliations or
efflorescences of the personality of a single individual which is so
often met with in the business world, and which always means a
remarkable individual behind them. The ideas, the enthusiasm, the
strength of Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield was all there was to the
Summerfield Advertising Agency. It was true there was a large force of
men working for him, advertising canvassers, advertising writers,
financial accountants, artists, stenographers, book-keepers and the
like, but they were all as it were an emanation or irradiation of the
personality of Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield. He was small, wiry,
black-haired, black-eyed, black-mustached, with an olive complexion and
even, pleasing, albeit at times wolfish, white teeth which indicated a
disposition as avid and hungry as a disposition well might be.

Mr. Summerfield had come up into his present state of affluence or
comparative affluence from the direst poverty and by the directest
route--his personal efforts. In the State in which he had originated,
Alabama, his family had been known, in the small circle to which they
were known at all, as poor white trash. His father had been a rather
lackadaisical, half-starved cotton planter who had been satisfied with a
single bale or less of cotton to the acre on the ground which he leased,