Dan looked up without altering the despondent attitude into which he had fallen, as he sat in one of his friend’s mahogany office chairs. “Yes; I guess it could have been a good deal worse. The only trouble is——” He took a deep and laboured breath, then laughed plaintively. “The only trouble is, while it might have been worse, I wasn’t hardly prepared for its bein’ so bad!”
“But it ain’t so blame bad, Dan.”
“No; I thought when I showed ’em what I had to fall back on they’d see they couldn’t afford to call. I thought I could show ’em it would be so profitable to tide me over and let me renew that they’d see it was the best policy. They ought to have seen it, too!”
Agreeing with this, Sam swore heartily, then he added, “Them old hardshells! The worst about ’em is they got their business training when everything was on the small scale, and they don’t know what a liberal policy means. You take that old Shelby, for instance, he was raised on such a stingy scale he thinks everybody’s a gambler that borrows a nickel on a million-dollar bond! He’s got one foot in the grave and he’s so shrunk it takes two people to see him, but, by golly, he wants to get his hands on everything! They’re a tough bunch, Dan, and I’m glad you got away from ’em alive. Because you still are alive. Anyhow you’re that much!”
Dan shook his head. “Just barely, I guess. If it had been that Broadwood hard luck by itself, I’d have pulled out o’ the hole. If that hadn’t come just at the same time our sales smashed with the Four——”
“That’s exactly the way bad things do come, though,” Sam interrupted, and went on to expound the philosophy of misfortune. “They come together, because that’s what makes ’em bad. It’s the comin’ together of bad things that makes all the trouble there is. If they’d come one at a time a person wouldn’t mind ’em so much. The angle I look at it, if a person goes along all right for a good while it’s only because a whole lot of bad things are holdin’ off on him. That makes ’em bound to come together when they do come. It never rains but it pours, Dan, as it were. That’s why, when such things happen, we got to put up the best umbrella a feller can lay his hands on.”
Dan did not seem to have heard him. “I could stand havin’ to sign over the Four to ’em, Sam,” he said. “I’d like to have kept it in my hands, but I could stand havin’ ’em take it. But when I think I had to sit here and sign over Ornaby——” Suddenly he uttered a broken sound, like a groan; and his whole face became corrugated with a distortion that took more than a moment to conquer. “Why, I’ve just given my life’s blood to Ornaby, and now——”
“Now?” Sam said testily. “Well, what’s the matter with now? Didn’t we force ’em to agree to turn you over some stock in it when they get the organization made? You ain’t out of Ornaby, are you? Not entirely, by no means!”
“It’s not mine,” Dan said. “It’s not mine any longer. Nothin’s mine any longer!”
His friend affected an angry impatience. “Don’t sit there and talk like that to a person that knows something! If you’d had to make the kind of assignment you might had to, you’d be where it would be pretty hard for you to come back. Ain’t you goin’ to try to come back?”