ed you with tents or
talcum; with sleeping-bags or skis or skates; with rubber boots, or
resin or reels. On their fourth floor you can be hatted for Palm Beach
or booted for Skagway. On the third, outfitted for St. Moritz or San
Antonio. But the fifth floor is the pride of the store. There is the
camper's dream realized. There you will find man's most ingenious
devices for softening Mother Nature's flinty bosom. Mosquito-proof
tents; pails that will not leak; fleece-lined sleeping-bags; cooking
outfits made up of pots and pans of every size, each shaped to disappear
mysteriously into the next, like a conjurer's outfit, the whole
swallowed up by a magic leather case.

Here Florian reigned. If you were a regular Inverness & Heath customer
you learned to ask for him as soon as the elevator tossed you up to his
domain. He met you with what is known in the business efficiency guides
as the strong personality greeting. It consisted in clasping your hand
with a grip that drove your ring into the bone, looking you straight in
the eye, registering alert magnetic force, and pronouncing your name
very distinctly. Like this: hand-clasp firm--straight in the eye--"How
do you do, Mr. Outertown. Haven't seen you since last June. How was the
trip?" He didn't mean to be a liar. And yet he lied daily and
magnificently for years, to the world and himself. When, for example,
in the course of purchasing rods, flies, tents, canoes, saddles, boots,
or sleeping-bags of him, you spoke of the delights of your contemplated
vacation, he would say, "That's the life. I'm a Western man, myself....
God's country!" He said it with a deep breath, and an exhalation, as one
who pants to be free of the city's noisome fumes. You felt he must have
been born with an equipment of chaps, quirts, spurs, and sombrero. You
see him flinging himself on a horse and clattering off with a flirt of
hoofs as they do it in the movies. His very manner sketched in a
background of plains, mountains, six-shooters, and cacti.

The truth of it was Florian Sykes had been born in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
At the age of three he had been brought to New York by a pair of
inexpert and migratory parents. Their reasons for migrating need not
concern us. They must, indeed, have been bad reasons. For Florian, at
thirteen, a spindle-legged errand-boy in over-size knickers, a cold sore
on his lip, and shoes chronically in need of resoling, had started to
work for the great sporting goods store