"All right. Here it is. And don't blame me if it sounds like cheap melodrama. This stuff," and he waved a hand toward the paper-laden table, "is an advertising campaign plan for the Griebler Gum Company, of St. Louis. Oh, don't look impressed. The office hasn't handed me any such commission. I just got the idea like a flash, and I've been working it out for the last two weeks. It worked itself out, almost--the way a really scorching idea does, sometimes. This Griebler has been advertising for years. You know the Griebler gum. But it hasn't been the right sort of advertising. Old Griebler, the original gum man, had fogy notions about advertising, and as long as he lived they had to keep it down. He died a few months ago--you must have read of it. Left a regular mint. Ben Griebler, the oldest son, started right in to clean out the cobwebs. Of course the advertising end of it has come in for its share of the soap and water. He wants to make a clean sweep of it. Every advertising firm in the country has been angling for the contract. It's going to be a real one. Two-thirds of the crowd have submitted plans. And that's just where my kick comes in. The Berg, Shriner Company makes it a rule never to submit advance plans."

"Excuse me if I seem a trifle rude," interrupted Mrs. McChesney, "but I'd like to know where you think you've been wronged in this."

"Right here!" replied Jock, and he slapped his pocket, "and here,"

he pointed to his head. "Two spots so vital that they make old Achilles's heel seem armor-plated. Ben Griebler is one of the show-me kind. He wants value received for money expended, and while everybody knows that he has a loving eye on the Berg, Shriner crowd, he won't sign a thing until he knows what he's getting. A firm's record, standing, staff, equipment, mean nothing to him."

"But, Jock, I still don't see--"

Jock gathered up a sheaf of loose papers and brandished them in the air. "This is where I come in. I've got a plan here that will fetch this Griebler person. Oh, I'm not dreaming. I outlined it for Sam Hupp, and he was crazy about it. Sam Hupp had some sort of plan outlined himself. But he said this made his sound as dry as cigars in Denver. And you know yourself that Sam Hupp's copy is so brilliant that he could sell brewery advertising to a temperance magazine."

Emma McChesney stood up. She looked a little impatient, and a trifle puzzled. "But why all this talk! I don't get you. Take your plan to Mr. Berg. If it's what you think it is he'll see it quicker than any other human being, and he'll probably fall on your neck and invest you in royal robes and give you a mahogany desk all your own."

"Oh, what's the good!" retorted Jock disgustedly. "This Griebler has an appointment at the office to-morrow. He'll be closeted with the Old Man. They'll call in Hupp. But never a plan will they reveal. It's against their code of ethics. Ethics! I'm sick of the word. I suppose you'd say I'm lucky to be a.s.sociated with a firm like that, and I suppose I am. But I wish in the name of all the G.o.ds of Business that they weren't so bloomin' conservative.

Ethics! They're all balled up in 'em, like Henry James in his style."

Emma McChesney came over from her side of the table and stood very close to her son. She laid one hand very lightly on his arm and looked up into the sullen, angry young face.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "She laid one hand very lightly on his arm and looked up into the sullen, angry young face"]

"I've seen older men than you are, Jock, and better men, and bigger men, wearing that same look, and for the same reason. Every ambitious man or woman in business wears it at one time or another. Sooner or later, Jock, you'll have your chance at the money end of this game. If you don't care about the thing you call ethics, it'll be sooner. If you do care, it will be later. It rests with you, but it's bound to come, because you've got the stuff in you."

"Maybe," replied Jock the cynical. But his face lost some of its sullenness as he looked down at that earnest, vivid countenance up-turned to his. "Maybe. It sounds all right, Mother--in the story books. But I'm not quite solid on it. These days it isn't so much what you've got in you that counts as what you can bring out. I know the young man's slogan used to be 'Work and Wait,' or something pretty like that. But these days they've boiled it down to one word--'Produce'!"

"The marvel of it is that there aren't more of 'em," observed Emma McChesney sadly.

"More what?"

"More lines. Here,"--she touched his forehead,--"and here,"--she touched his eyes.

"Lines!" Jock swung to face a mirror. "Good! I'm so infernally young-looking that no one takes me seriously. It's darned hard trying to convince people you're a captain of finance when you look like an errand boy."

From the center of the room Mrs. McChesney watched the boy as he surveyed himself in the gla.s.s. And as she gazed there came a frightened look into her eyes. It was gone in a minute, and in its place came a curious little gleam, half amused, half pugnacious.

"Jock McChesney, if I thought that you meant half of what you've said to-night about honor, and ethics, and all that, I'd--"

"Spank me, I suppose," said the young six-footer.

"No," and all the humor had fled, "I--Jock, I've never said much to you about your father. But I think you know that he was what he was to the day of his death. You were just about eight when I made up my mind that life with him was impossible. I said then--and you were all I had, son--that I'd rather see you dead than to have you turn out to be a son of your father. Don't make me remember that wish, Jock."

Two quick steps and his arms were about her. His face was all contrition. "Why--Mother! I didn't mean--You see this is business, and I'm crazy to make good, and it's such a fight--"

"Don't I know it?" demanded Emma McChesney. "I guess your mother hasn't been sitting home embroidering lunchcloths these last fifteen years." She lifted her head from the boy's shoulder. "And now, son, considering me, not as your doting mother, but in my business capacity as secretary of the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, suppose you reveal to me the inner workings of this plan of yours. I'd like to know if you really are the advertising wizard that you think you are."

So it was that long after Annie's dinner dishes had ceased to clatter in the kitchen; long after she had put her head in at the door to ask, "Aigs 'r cakes for breakfast?" long after those two busy brains should have rested in sleep, the two sat at either side of the light-flooded table, the face of one glowing as he talked, the face of the other sparkling as she listened. And at midnight:

"Why, you infant wonder!" exclaimed Emma McChesney.

At nine o'clock next morning when Jock McChesney entered the offices of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company he carried a flat, compact bundle of papers under his arm encased in protecting covers of pasteboard, and further secured by bands of elastic.

This he carried to his desk, deposited in a drawer, and locked the drawer.

By eleven o'clock the things which he had predicted the night before had come to pa.s.s. A plump little man, with a fussy manner and Western clothes had been ushered into Bartholomew Berg's private office. Instinct told him that this was Griebler. Jock left his desk and strolled up to get the switchboard operator's confirmation of his guess. Half an hour later Sam Hupp hustled by and disappeared into the Old Man's sanctum.

Jock fingered the upper left-hand drawer of his desk. The maddening blankness of that closed door! If only he could find some excuse for walking into that room--any old excuse, no matter how wild!--just to get a chance at it--

His telephone rang. He picked up the receiver, his eye on the closed door, his thoughts inside that room.

"Mr. Berg wants to see you right away," came the voice of the switchboard operator.

Something seemed to give way inside--something in the region of his brain--no, his heart--no, his lungs--

"Well, can you beat that!" said Jock McChesney aloud, in a kind of trance of joy. "Can--you--beat--that!"

Then he b.u.t.toned the lower b.u.t.ton of his coat, shrugged his shoulders with an extra wriggle at the collar (the modern hero's method of girding up his loins), and walked calmly into Bartholomew Berg's very private office.

In the second that elapsed between the opening and the closing of the door Jock's glance swept the three men--Bartholomew Berg, quiet, inscrutable, seated at his great table-desk; Griebler, lost in the depths of a great leather chair, smoking fussily and twitching with a hundred little restless, irritating gestures; Sam Hupp, standing at the opposite side of the room, hands in pockets, att.i.tude argumentative.

"This is Mr. McChesney," said Bartholomew Berg. "Mr. Griebler, McChesney."

Jock came forward, smiling that charming smile of his. "Mr.

Griebler," he said, extending his hand, "this is a great pleasure."

"Hm!" growled Ben Griebler, "I didn't know they picked 'em so young."

His voice was a piping falsetto that somehow seemed to match his restless little eyes.

Jock thrust his hands hurriedly into his pockets. He felt his face getting scarlet.

"They're--ah--using 'em young this year," said Bartholomew Berg.

His voice sounded bigger, and smoother, and pleasanter than ever in contrast with that other's shrill tone. "I prefer 'em young, myself. You'll never catch McChesney using 'in the last a.n.a.lysis'

to drive home an argument. He has a new idea about every nineteen minutes, and every other one's a good one, and every nineteenth or so's an inspiration." The Old Man laughed one of his low, chuckling laughs.

"Hm--that so?" piped Ben Griebler. "Up in my neck of the woods we aren't so long on inspiration. We're just working men, and we wear working clothes--"

"Oh, now," protested Berg, his eyes twinkling, "McChesney's necktie and socks and handkerchief may form one lovely, blissful color scheme, but that doesn't signify that his advertising schemes are not just as carefully and artistically blended."

Ben Griebler looked shrewdly up at Jock through narrowed lids.

"Maybe. I'll talk to you in a minute, young man--that is--" he turned quickly upon Berg--"if that isn't against your crazy principles, too?"

"Why, not at all," Bartholomew Berg a.s.sured him. "Not at all. You do me an injustice."

Griebler moved up closer to the broad table. The two fell into a low-voiced talk. Jock looked rather helplessly around at Sam Hupp.

That alert gentleman was signaling him frantically with head and wagging finger. Jock crossed the big room to Hupp's side. The two moved off to a window at the far end.

"Give heed to your Unkie," said Sam Hupp, talking very rapidly, very softly, and out of one corner of his mouth. "This Griebler's looking for an advertising manager. He's as pig-headed as a--a--well, as a pig, I suppose. But it's a corking chance, youngster, and the Old Man's just recommended you--strong. Now--"

"Me--!" exploded Jock.

"Shut up!" hissed Hupp. "Two or three years with that firm would be the making of you--if you made good, of course. And you could.

They want to move their factory here from St. Louis within the next few years. Now listen. When he talks to you, you play up the keen, alert stuff with a dash of sophistication, see? If you can keep your mouth shut and throw a kind of a canny, I-get-you, look into your eyes, all the better. He's gabby enough for two. Try a line of talk that is filled with the fire and enthusiasm of youth, combined with the good judgment and experience of middle age, and you've--"