I got up and hunted for my tobacco. "The devil with you, Knowlton, is
that every time I begin to imagine everything is all right, you have
some infernal new anxiety to thrust under my nose."
"Shove your pipe under it instead and shut up," he laughed. "That's
life, my boy. You can't sit it out in a rocking chair. If you try, they
take away the front porch from under you when you aren't looking."
I filled my pipe and studied Knowlton's face as I did so. It came to me
with a start that I had been taking him for granted for several months
now. I no longer analysed him, or tried to, as I had done at first.
Suppose Knowlton was not himself on the square and I had been careless?
The idea was disturbing. There he sat, characteristically enough, with
his legs crossed, the tips of his fingers together, a big cigar in his
mouth, and his sharp eyes puckered at the corners with crows' feet. He
was oblivious to my scrutiny, for he was turning over the new
proposition in his mind. He could day dream in arithmetic as a poet
could upon hearing the song of a lark. His face was hard, but there was
a rugged honesty in it, a touch of the old Scots' stock from which he
sprang, with the superimposed keenness and alertness of the
trail-following American. Besides, I remembered his confidences to me
that Christmas Eve out at the country club. He too was a
sentimentalist--and such as we, who are sentimentalists, are apt to be
dishonest only to ourselves or to those we love; the money form of
dishonesty is abhorrent to an emotional man. Knowlton was of the common
type who masked deep feeling by an outward hard glamour of efficiency. I
must have gone on too long staring at him, for he suddenly turned around
with a slight narrowing of the eyes.
"Wondering if I am big enough for the job, Ted?" he asked casually, as
he tried to remedy the faulty burning of his cigar. "I wondered it about
you. It's only fair for you to have your turn," he went on.
"I don't know," I answered. "I don't know whether either of us is. It's
a big responsibility we are starting out to face."
"Everything is. It's a responsibility to buy a basketful of hot dogs and
sell them at a street corner. It might rain," he countered.
"I know," I laughed. "Hotspur said the same thing."
"Shakespeare again?"
I nodded. He suddenly laid down his cigar. "By God, Ted," he exclaimed,
"were you thinking I might not be on the square?"
I hesitated for a second, puzzled. Either he was a very clever man,
or--I did not know what to think.
"You once told me to take no one for granted," I fumbled slowly, "if it
was a question of business. There were to be no exceptions, you said." I
saw the twinkle gathering in the corners of his eyes. "I've known you,
Knowlton, nine months, but I don't know very much about you."
He laughed long and loud. "That's having a man's teaching come home and
howl on his own doorstep!" he laughed. "Sometimes, Ted, I think you are
the biggest damn fool I ever knew, and then you'll do something else,
and I say, 'No, cuss it all, the boy has brains after all.'"
"Meaning that now I am in the damn fool stage?" I snorted, rather
irritated. He had a way of making one feel as if he held one in his
hand.
"It penetrates," he shouted. "The boy is getting intelligent again," and
he laughed some more. "Ted," he said, growing instantly serious, "since
I earned my first dollar, you are the only man who has ever to my face
doubted my honesty." He went off into a laugh again. "And to think," he
roared, "that I promised myself that I'd bust the first one who did on
the nose."
I pulled at my pipe, waiting for him to finish. I was conscious of an
unpleasant glow at the back of my neck.
"Ted, you raised this issue. Let's have it out." I waved my pipe
deprecatingly. "No, sir," he went on, "you asked for a dog fight. We'll
have one. Have you ever studied the books of the company?"
"No," I muttered. "It wouldn't do me any good if I did. I don't know
bookkeeping."
A trace of a grin returned to his face. "Well, you can hire chartered
accountants to do it for you," he said. "If ever you do look at them,
you will discover that I am a salaried man and haven't one penny
interest in this company except the professional one of making good on a
job."
I was out of my depth and lacked the technical vocabulary to make a
suitable reply.
"Now, Ted, if we do put over this new proposition, all it will mean to
me will be a letter of thanks from your father. I mean, legally
speaking, I'll have no special claims for anything I do. I have no
financial interest at stake except the purely human one of making a good
job a better one."