Part 51 (2/2)
”Suppose you let me do some of the worrying, Boyee.”
”Haven't you enough troubles in your own business, Dad?” smiled Hal.
”Machinery, son. Automatic, at that. Runs itself and turns out the dollars, regular, for breakfast. Very different from the newspaper game.”
”I _should_ like your advice.”
”On the take-it-or-leave-it principle, I suppose,” answered Dr.
Surtaine, with entire good humor. ”In the Pierce matter you left it. How do you like the results?”
”Not very much.”
Dr. Surtaine spread out upturned hands, in dumb, oracular ill.u.s.tration of his own sagacity.
”But I'd do the same thing over again if it came up for decision.”
”That's exactly what you mustn't do, Hal. Banging around the shop like that, cracking people on the knuckles may give you a temporary feeling of power and importance” (Hal flushed boyishly), ”but it don't pay. Now, if I get you out of this sc.r.a.pe, I want you to go more carefully.”
”How are you going to get me out of it?”
”Square it with E.M. Pierce. He's a good friend of mine.”
”Do you really like Mr. Pierce, Dad?”
”Hm! Ah--er--well, Boyee, as for that, that's another tail on a cat. In a business way, I meant.”
”In a business way he's trying to be a pretty efficient enemy of mine.
How would you like it if he undertook to interfere with Certina?”
By perceptible inches Dr. Surtaine's chest rounded in slow expansion.
”Legislatures and government bureaus have tried that. They never got away with it yet. Elias Pierce is a pretty big man in this town, but I guess he knows enough to keep hands and tongue off me.”
”If not off your line of business,” amended Ellis. ”Did you see his interview in the 'Telegram'?”
He tossed over a copy of the paper folded to a column wherein Mr.
Pierce, with more temper than tact, had possessed himself of his adversary's editorial text, ”Heredity,” and proceeded to perform a variant thereon.
”If this young whippersnapper,” Mr. Pierce had said, ”this fledgling thug of journalism, had stopped to think of the source of his unearned money, perhaps he wouldn't talk so glibly about heredity.”
Thence the interview pursued a course of indirect reflection upon the matter and method of the patent medicine trade, as exemplified in Certina and its allied industries. The top b.u.t.ton of Dr. Surtaine's glossy morning coat, as he read, seemed in danger of flying off into infinite s.p.a.ce. His powerful hands opened and closed slowly. Leaning forward he reached for the telephone, but checked himself.
”Mr. Pierce seems to have let go both barrels at once,” he said with a strong effort of control.
”Pretty little exhibition of temper, isn't it?” said Hal, smiling.
”Temper's expensive. Perhaps we'll teach Elias M. Pierce that lesson before we're through. You remember it, too, next time you start in on a muckraking jag.”
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