“When you gave that fellow the job,” began Jock hotly, “I told you, and Buck told you, that—­”

Mrs. McChesney interrupted wearily.  “Yes, I know.  You’ll never have a grander chance to say ‘I told you so.’  I hired him because he was out of a job and we needed a man who knew the Middle-Western trade, and then because—­well, poor fellow, he begged so and promised to keep straight.  As though I oughtn’t to know that a pinochle-and-poker traveling man can never be anything but a pinochle-and-poker traveling man—­”

The office door opened as there appeared in answer to the buzzer a very alert, very smiling, and very tidy office girl.  Emma McChesney had tried office boys, and found them wanting.

“Tell Mr. Meyers I want to see him.”

“Just going out to lunch,”—­she turned like a race horse trembling to be off,—­“putting on his overcoat in the front office.  Shall I—­”

“Catch him.”

“Listen here,” began Jock uncomfortably; “if you’re going to call him perhaps I’d better vanish.”

“To save Ed Meyers’s tender feelings!  You don’t know him.  Fat Ed Meyers could be courtmartialed, tried, convicted, and publicly disgraced, with his epaulets torn off, and his sword broken, and likely as not he’d stoop down, pick up a splinter of steel to use as a toothpick, and Castlewalk down the aisle to the tune with which they were drumming him out of the regiment.  Stay right here.  Meyers’s explanation ought to be at least amusing, if not educating.”

In the corridor outside could be heard some one blithely humming in the throaty tenor of the fat man.  The humming ceased with a last high note as the door opened and there entered Fat Ed Meyers, rosy, cherubic, smiling, his huge frame looming mountainous in the rippling folds of a loose-hung London plaid topcoat.

“Greetings!” boomed this cheery vision, raising one hand, palm outward, in mystic salute.  He beamed upon the frowning Jock.  “How’s the infant prodigy!” The fact that Jock’s frown deepened to a scowl ruffled him not at all.  “And what,” went on he, crossing his feet and leaning negligently against Mrs. McChesney’s desk, “and what can I do for thee, fair lady?”

  [Illustration:  “‘Greetings!’”]

“For me?” said Emma McChesney, looking up at him through narrowed eyelids.  “I’ll tell you what.  You can explain to me, in what they call a few well-chosen words, just how you, or any other living creature, could manage to turn in an expense account like that on a six-weeks’ missionary trip through the Middle West.”

“Dear lady,”—­in the bland tones that one uses to an unreasonable child,—­“you will need no explanation if you will just remember to lay the stress on the word missionary.  I went forth through the Middle West to spread the light among the benighted skirt trade.  This wasn’t a selling trip, dear lady.  It was a buying expedition.  And I had to buy, didn’t I? all the way from Michigan to Indiana.”