I
Roger Payne had come to a decision. He waited until the office door
had closed behind the departing stenographer, then swung his long legs
recklessly upon his flat-top desk and shouted across the room at his
partner:
"Jim Tibbetts!"
Tibbetts frowned. He was footing a column of cost figures and the
blast from his young partner nearly made him lose count.
Payne grinned. He liked his partner. Had he not done so he would
never have allowed himself to be dragged into business--Tibbetts &
Payne, Manufacturers' Agents. Two years of it. Two years from the day
on a Western irrigation dam when Payne had installed the cement machine
that Tibbetts was selling. Two years--to Payne--of prison. And now
his moment of decision had arrived.
Roger Payne was out of place. He did not fit the furniture. There was
a look of permanence to the dark tan upon his face which labeled it not
the surface sunburn which may be collected during a two weeks' vacation
or gradually acquired by spending Saturday afternoon and Sunday on the
golf links. It was a tan that suggested leather, and which comes as
much from frostbite as sunburn, and from the whip of frozen snowflakes
as the heated winds of summer.
Beneath the tan the face was too lean and hard to be in sympathy with
the high polish of flat-top desks.
His body also was lean and hard. Even the proper cut of a carefully
tailored business suit could not conceal a certain bunchiness about the
shoulders which had nothing at all in common with office efficiency.
The shoulders were outrageously broad, the barrel of his chest was
scandalously deep, the hands distressingly large and brown, considered
in intimate association with filing systems and adding machines. And
the keen blue eyes, sometimes gazing with a far-away, unbusiness-like
look out into the grimy, roaring cañon called Wabash Avenue, sometimes
twinkling with unbusinesslike mischief, inevitably completed the
exposure of Roger Payne.
He did not belong there, and he knew it. Hence it was that he suddenly
jerked his long legs from the desk, sat up and said swiftly:
"Jim Tibbetts, I want you to buy me out!"
Tibbetts blinked. He was bald, plump, spectacled and kindly.
"Eh? What say? Dang it, Rog, you made me lose count!"
He began all over to foot the column of cost figures. He footed from
bottom to top, checked the result by footing from top to bottom, erased
his light penciled figures and rewrote them in ink, laid the sheet to
one side and folded his hands in resignation.
"I knew it was coming, Rog. I've seen the signs for weeks past.
You've been ramping round like a man in prison. Dang it, Rog, I'm
sorry."
"Jim," said Roger, "this is no business for me to be in."
"It's a good business, Roger," protested Tibbetts mildly. "There's
nothing wrong with it. We've been running only two years. Look what
we've done. Look at our prospects. We're pretty well off already.
We'll be rich pretty soon. Why? Because Roger Payne comes pretty near
being a genius with machinery and Jim Tibbetts can beat most fellows
selling. It's too good to spoil, Roger."
"Two years," repeated Payne slowly. "Jim, it seems like a lifetime to
me, and it doesn't seem real. The other did--bridgebuilding,
irrigation, timber cruising. That was living."
"That was bumming, and you know it!" protested Tibbetts. "That was kid
stuff; it was your way of sowing your wild oats. How much money did
you have when it was over? How much have you got now, after only two
years of business? It was time-wasting, that's what it was, and you
know it."
"It was outdoors," said Payne.
They were silent for a while.
"Roger," said Tibbetts sorrowfully, "are you beginning to turn dreamer?"
"No," said Payne emphatically, "I'm waking up. I'm like a man who's
been asleep for the last two years. I'm just coming out of it. I'm
wide awake; and that's why I've come to see that this game and I don't
belong together. You said you'd noticed me ramping round like a man in
prison. That's right! Can you guess why? Well, just because of what
I tell you; I've come to myself, Jim, and I've got to get out."
"Why? Why have you got to get out?"
Roger Payne shook a hard brown fist at the gray-stone walls of the
other side of the clanging street.
"That's why, Jim. It's a prison--to me. Easy enough if you fit in it.
I don't. So I'm going to get out; and it's got to be now."
"But why, in the name of Sam, now? You're getting old, I'll admit.
Let's see, how long ago is it since I gave you that scarfpin for your
twenty-seventh birthday? Twenty-seven! Come out of it, Rog.
Fifty-seven is the proper age to begin dreaming about quitting
business."
"I know it. That's why I'm going to do it now, before the game gets
me. It gets everybody who stays in it. It would even get me. Then at
fifty-seven, as you say, I might quit and go outdoors and begin to
live--too late. Jim, did you ever see a more pitiful spectacle than a
natural-born outdoor man who's kept his nose on a desk for thirty years
and then realized his lifelong dream? Neither have I. He thinks he's
going to get out and start living then, but what he does is to begin to
die--from the shoulders up. No, sir!" The young man sprang to his
feet, flinging the swivel chair away with a kick. "I'm not going to be
trapped. I'd rather hike back to-morrow to that irrigation job out
West and boss Hunkies for Higgins than sit cooped up here day after day
and get rich."
"You--crazy young fool!" said Tibbetts affectionately.
"All right, Jim. Crazy, if you please. But that is what's going to
happen; you're going to buy me out, or get another partner, and I"--he
filled his great lungs with air--"I'm going to get outdoors."
"What're you going to do? I'll bet you don't know. Have you got any
plans?"
"Yes, I'm going to get out of the city the day after I wind things up
here."
"Where you going?"
"Back home to Jordan City and look the old town over, first of all."
"Jordan City! Why--why you aren't a retired farmer."