with his report. "Nothing to it," says he. "This Rowley person has a lot of half-baked ideas about briquets and retort recoveries, and talks vaguely of big profits; but he's got nothing practical. I shipped him off." "But," says Mr. Robert, "I think he was promised that his schemes should have a consideration by the board." "Very well," says Willis G. jaunty. "I'll give 'em a report next meeting. Wednesday, isn't it? Hardly worth wasting their time over, though." And here I'd been boostin' the Rowley proposition to Mr. Robert good and hard, almost gettin' him enthusiastic over it! I was smeared, that's all! My first stab at makin' myself useful in my new swing-chair job has been brushed aside as a beginner's bungle; and there sits25 Mr. Robert, prob'ly wonderin' if he hadn't made a mistake in takin' me off the gate! 25 I stares at a row of empty pigeonholes for a solid hour after that, not doin' a blamed thing but race my thinkin' gears tryin' to find out where I was at. This dummy act that I'd been let in for might be all right for some; but it didn't suit me. I've got to have action in mine. So, long before quittin' time, I slams the desk cover down and pikes out on Rowley's trail. He might be a dead duck; but I wanted to know how and why. I had his address all right, and it didn't take me long to locate him in a fifth-story loft down on lower Sixth-ave. It's an odd joint too, with a cot bed in one corner, a work bench along the avenue side, a cook-stove in the middle, and a kitchen table where the coffeepot was crowded on each side by a rack of test tubes. Old Rowley himself, with his sleeves rolled up, is sittin' in a rickety arm chair peelin' potatoes. He's grouchy too. "Oh, it's you, is it?" says he. "Well, you might just as well trot right back to the Corrugated Trust and tell 'em that Old Hen Rowley don't give two hoots for their whole outfit." "I take it you didn't get on so well with Mr. Briscoe?" says I. "Briscoe!" he grunts savage. "Who could talk business to a smart Alec like that! He knew it all before I'd begun. You'd think I26 was trying to sell him a gold brick. All right! We'll see what the Bethlehem people have to say." 26 "What?" says I. "Before you get the final word from us?"
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