“If you’d make a billion dollars, Bobby, but didn’t get back your father’s business that Silas Trimmer snaked away from you, Johnson would think you’d overlooked the one best bet.”
“So would I,” said Bobby soberly, and he had but very little more to say until the chauffeur stopped at Bobby’s own door, where puffy old Applerod, who had been next to Johnson in his usefulness to old John Burnit, stood nervously awaiting him on the steps.
“Terrible, sir! Terrible!” spluttered Applerod the moment he caught sight of Bobby. “This open defiance of Mr. Stone will put entirely out of existence what little there is left of the Brightlight Electric Company.”
“Cheer up, Applerod, for death must come to us all,” encouraged Bobby. “Such shreds and fragments of the Brightlight as there are left would have been wiped out anyhow; and frankly, if you must have it, I put you in there as general manager, when I shifted Johnson to the Bulletin this morning, because there was nothing to manage.”
Applerod threw up his hands in dismay.
“And there will be less. Oh, Mr. Burnit, if your father were only here!”
Bobby, whose suavity Applerod had never before seen ruffled, turned upon him angrily.
“I’m tired hearing about my father, Applerod,” he declared. “I revere the governor’s memory too much to want to be made angry by the mention of his name. Hereafter, kindly catch the idea, if you can, that I am my own man and must work out my own salvation; and I propose to do it! Biff, you don’t mind if I put off seeing you until to-morrow? I have a dinner engagement this evening and very little time to dress.”
“His own man,” said Applerod sorrowfully when Bobby had left them. “John Burnit would be half crazy if he could know what a botch his son is making of things. I don’t see how a man could let himself be cheated four times in business.”
“I can tell you,” retorted Biff. “All his old man ever did for him was to stuff his pockets with kale, and let him grow up into the sort of clubs where one sport says: ‘I’m going to walk down to the corner.’ Says the other sport: ‘I’ll bet you see more red-headed girls on the way down than you do on the way back.’ Says the first sport: ‘You’re on for a hundred.’ He goes down to the corner and he comes back. ‘How about the red-headed girls?’ asks the second sport. ‘I lose,’ says the first sport; ‘here’s your hundred.’ Now, when Bobby is left real money, he starts in to play the same open-face game, and when one of these business wolves tells him anything Bobby don’t stop to figure whether the mut means what he says, or means something else that sounds like the same thing. Now, if Bobby was a simp they’d sting him in so many places that he’d be swelled all over, like an exhibition cream puff; but he ain’t a simp. It took him four times to learn that he can’t take a man’s word in business. That’s all he needed. Bobby’s awake now, and more than that he’s mad, and if I hear you make another crack that he ain’t about all the candy I’ll sick old Johnson on you,” and with this dire threat Biff wheeled, leaving Mr. Applerod speechless with red-faced indignation.