Maybe it ain’t figured in the headlines, or been noised around enough for the common stockholders to get panicky over it, but, believe me, it was some battle!  Uh-huh!  What else could you expect with Old Hickory Ellins on one side and George Wesley Jones on the other?  And me?  Say, as it happens, I was right on the firin’ line.  Talk about your drummer boys of ’61—­I guess the office boy of this A. M. ain’t such a dead one!

Course I knew when Piddie begins tiptoein’ around important, and Mr. Robert cuts his lunchtime down to an hour, that there’s something in the air besides humidity.

“Boy,” says Old Hickory, shootin’ his words out past the stub of a thick black cigar, “I’m expecting a Mr. Jones sometime this afternoon.”

“Yes, Sir,” says I.  “Any particular Jones, Sir?”

“That,” says he, “is a detail with which you need not burden your mind.  I am not anticipating a convention of Joneses.”

“Oh!” says I.  “I was only thinkin’ that in case some other guy by the same names should——­”

“Yes, I understand,” he breaks in; “but in that remote contingency I will do my best to handle the situation alone.  And when Mr. Jones comes show him in at once.  After that I am engaged for the remainder of the day.  Is that quite clear?”

“I’m next,” says I.  “Pass a Jones, and then set the block.”

If he thought he could mesmerize me by any such simple motions as that he had another guess.  Why, even if it had been my first day on the job, I’d have been hep that it wa’n’t any common weekday Jones he was expectin’ to stray in accidental.  Besides, the minute I spots that long, thin nose, the close-cropped, grizzly mustache, and the tired gray eyes with the heavy bags underneath, I knew it was George Wesley himself.  Ain’t his pictures been printed often enough lately?

He looks the part too, and no wonder!  If I’d been hammered the way he has, with seventeen varieties of Rube Legislatures shootin’ my past career as full of holes as a Swiss cheese, grand juries handin’ down new indictments every week end, four thousand grouchy share-holders howlin’ about pared dividends, and twice as many editorial pens proddin’ ’em along——­well, take it from me, I’d be on my way towards the tall trees with my tongue hangin’ out!

Here he is, though, with his shoulders back and a sketchy, sarcastic smile flickerin’ in his mouth corners as he shows up for a hand-to-hand set-to with Old Hickory Ellins.  Course it’s news to me that the Corrugated interests and the P., B. & R. road are mixed up anywhere along the line; but it ain’t surprisin’.

Besides mines and rollin’ mills, we do a wholesale grocery business, run a few banks, own a lot of steam freighters, and have all kinds of queer ginks on our payroll, from welfare workers to would-be statesmen.  We’re always ready to slip one of our directors onto a railroad board too; so I takes it that the way P., B. & R. has been juggled lately was a game that touches us somewhere on the raw.  Must be some kind of a war on the slate, or Old Hickory’d never called for a topliner like George Wesley Jones to come on the carpet.  If it had been a case of passin’ the peace pipe, Mr. Ellins would be goin’ out to Chicago to see him.