The notion of any sort of ownership moved Stoller’s respect, and he asked more deferentially, “Makin’ a good thing out of it?”

“A living, I suppose.  Some of the high-class weeklies feel the competition of the ten-cent monthlies.  But ‘Every Other Week’ is about the best thing we’ve got in the literary way, and I guess it’s holding its own.”

“Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad,” Stoller said, with a return to the sourness of his earlier mood.  “I don’t know as I care much for his looks; I seen him when he came in with you.  No snap to him.”  He clicked shut the penknife he had been paring his nails with, and started up with the abruptness which marked all his motions, mental and physical; as he walked heavily out of the room he said, without looking at Burnamy, “You want to be ready by half past ten at the latest.”

Stoller’s father and mother were poor emigrants who made their way to the West with the instinct for sordid prosperity native to their race and class; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana town where their son was born, and throve in it from the start.  He could remember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheese and pickle the pigs’ feet, which they took turns in selling at as great a price as they could extort from the townspeople.  She was a good and tender mother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob in mimicry after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught him to fight the Americans, who stoned him when he came out of his gate, and mobbed his home-coming; and mocked and tormented him at play-time till they wore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him through the exhaustion of their invention.  No one, so far as the gloomy, stocky, rather dense little boy could make out, ever interfered in his behalf; and he grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which entailed upon him the hard fate of being Dutch among the Americans.  He hated his native speech so much that he cried when he was forced to use it with his father and mother at home; he furiously denied it with the boys who proposed to parley with him in it on such terms as “Nix come arouce in de Dytchman’s house.”  He disused it so thoroughly that after his father took him out of school, when he was old enough to help in the shop, he could not get back to it.  He regarded his father’s business as part of his national disgrace, and at the cost of leaving his home he broke away from it, and informally apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith and wagon-maker.  When it came to his setting up for himself in the business he had chosen, he had no help from his father, who had gone on adding dollar to dollar till he was one of the richest men in the place.