He paused for a few moments, and appeared to be thinking.
“Do you know who that Ed Skidmore is?” he asked abruptly.
“No; only he was quite nice, and evidently from the East.”
“He is my brother Lester, and he is the man who stampeded the punchers’ horses last night with his flashlight.”
“He is? I should never have suspected it; you are absolutely different in looks.”
“I know we are, or I shouldn’t have risked his life last night. Well, I bring him into this because I have to. He is part of the story. Lester was always a wild youth, particularly after the governor stuck him on a bookkeeper’s stool and tried to make a business man out of him. The boy couldn’t add a column of figures a foot long correctly inside of ten tries. I took to the game a little better than he did, and managed to get promoted occasionally. But Lester never did.
“Father believed, and announced often enough, that anybody that couldn’t add figures and keep accounts had no business to handle money. To discipline Lester, who he thought was loafing when he really was incapable, the governor cut off 296 the boy’s allowance almost entirely and told him he would have to live on his wages until he showed he could earn more.
“Well, Julie, you know what kind of a cad I was back in the old days—rich, spoiled, flattered by men, and sought after by women. (I can say these things now, since I’ve learned their opposites!) Just try to imagine, then, the effect of such an order on Lester, who was always the petted one of us two because he was small and delicate! It was like pouring cold water on a red-hot stove lid.
“Tied more than ever to his desk, Lester wanted more amusements than ever. But he had only about fifteen a week where he had been accustomed to five times the amount. He drifted and borrowed and pledged and pawned, and finally was caught by some loan-sharks, who got him out of one difficulty only to plunge him into three others.
“Although my father had a narrow-gauge mind as far as life in general is concerned, I will say this for him: that he was right in everything he did about business. He had made it a rule of the firm that anybody who borrowed money was fired on the spot. Lester knew this, and, while he would have liked nothing better than the sack, he did not 297 want to disgrace the governor before his employees and all the business world. So he clung along and tried to make a go of it.