“That is where you are wrong,” was the prompt contradiction. “All business is a taking of chances. The merchant who buys a stock of goods in spring that he hopes to sell in the fall is taking a chance. The lawyer who expects to charge a fat fee if he wins his cause is taking a chance. The farmer who plows and plants is taking a mighty long chance on what the season and the weather will do to him. Don’t you see how it runs through everything a man can do?”
“Yes, but——”
“Take our own job here and look at the hamperings. I’m talking to you now as Adam Vallory’s boy and not as a hired man. We were ground to the limit on the bidding; and at every turn the railroad people are trying to get more than they bargained for—something for nothing. It’s all right; that’s their part of it, you’ll say. But in addition to all this we’ve got Jim Lushing against us; a man who will stoop to any kind of low, disreputable trickery to do us up. You may say it’s dog eat dog, and so it is. But it’s business.”
David took a leaf from his father’s book and proffered it, not too confidently.
“Dad was always so strong on the ethics of a thing,” he began; but Eben Grillage interrupted with a good-natured laugh.
“Your father is a white-haired old angel; and he is just about as completely out of touch with the modern business world as the other angels are. There are no theoretical ethics in business, David. If you don’t fight for your own hand, you go to the wall, every time. That is one reason why I offered you a job. I didn’t want to see Adam Vallory’s boy settle down in the old Middleboro Security and become a fossilized back-number before he could grow a beard.”
Here it was, deep in the personalities again, and David Vallory would have been either more or less than human if he could have disentangled himself from the purely friendly relation.
“You have been mighty good to me—good to all of us,” he broke out gratefully. “If I’ve said too much about that tunnel roof——”
“Just you forget the tunnel roof and let it go. It has stood up all right since we drove through it, and you know what it would cost to shoot it down and plug the hole. I want to see you succeed, David, and you can’t do it if you are always worrying about the other fellow’s side of things. I only wish I had a boy like you of my own.”
“You have something vastly better,” said the model son, with a smile.