em carefully, then he
readjusted them and leaned forward, looking the young man over from
head to foot, as if he had never until this moment seen more than his
vague outlines.

"Um-m! You're nineteen years old, I believe!"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, then, an hour's delay won't be serious. Now you go back to
your desk and send Mr. Murphy here. I'll let you know shortly whether
Saturday night or this noon will be convenient."

It was perhaps a half-hour before lunch-time when Mr. Comer again
called for Mitchell, greeting him with the gruff inquiry:

"See here, do you think I'm going to advance you from twelve to
twenty-five a week at one clip?"

"No, sir."

"Humph! I'm not. I had a talk with Murphy. I think he's a liar, but
I'm going to make it fifteen hundred a year and expenses. Now get busy
and work your 'trade' for all it's worth."

Young Mitchell's knees wabbled, but, having learned the value of a
black mask and a gun, he went through his victim thoroughly while he
had him down.

"I'd like a traveling position the first of the year, sir, if you
don't mind."

"All right! If you hold your present gait I'll give you the Western
roads. Anything else you'd like? Well, then, git!"

That day Louis switched from the narrow-countered bakery-lunch route
to regular standard-gauge restaurants; he ordered clothes like a
bookmaker's bride and he sent a cubic foot of violets to Miss Harris.
At dinner-time he patronized Mr. Gross so tantalizingly that the
latter threatened to pull his nose out until it resembled a yard of
garden hose.

The whole boarding-house was agog at Mitchell's good fortune and
Miss Harris smiled on him in a manner reminiscent of the good old
ante-bookkeeper--one might say "ante-vellum"--days. She hinted that
Mr. Gross's company did not wholly satisfy her soul-hunger, and even
confessed that she was lonely; but this was Mitchell's Rock Island
evening, and although the frank surrender in Miss Harris's eyes caused
him to gasp as if he were slowly settling into a barrel of ice-water,
he tore himself from her side.

Louis's batting average would have reached one thousand had it not
been for the Monon. Miss Day, the young lady there, had a vocabulary
limited to "Hello," "Too high," and "Good-by," and it became
particularly galling to learn that the fellow at James & Naughten's
was pulling down the business, so Mitchell went to Murphy with a
proposition which showed that his mental growth had kept pace w