“Look here, Governor,” protested Bobby aloud, to his lively remembrance of his father as he might have stood in that very room, “I call this rather rubbing it in. It’s a bit unsportsmanlike. It’s almost like laying a trap for a chap who doesn’t know the game,” and, rankling with a sense of injustice, he went out to Johnson.
“I say, Johnson,” he complained, “it’s rather my fault for being too stubborn to ask about it, but if you knew that Mr. Trimmer was trying to work a game on me that was dangerous to the business, why didn’t you volunteer to explain it to me; to forewarn me and give me a chance for judgment with all the pros and cons in front of me?”
“From the bottom of my heart, Mr. Burnit,” said Johnson with feeling, “I should like to have done it; but it was forbidden.”
He already had lying before him another of the gray envelopes, and this he solemnly handed over. It was addressed:
To My Son,
Upon His Complaining that Johnson Gave Him No Warning Concerning Silas Trimmer
The message it contained was:
“It takes hard chiseling to make a man, but if the material is the right grain the tool-marks won’t show. If I had wanted you merely to make money, I would have left the business entirely in the hands of Johnson and Applerod. But there is no use to put off pulling a tooth. It only hurts worse in the end.”
When Bobby left the office he felt like walking in the middle of the street to avoid alley corners, since he was unable to divine from what direction the next brick might come. He had taken the business to heart more than he had imagined that he would, and the very fact of his father’s having foreseen that he would succumb to this consolidation made him give grave heed to the implied suggestion that he would be a heavy loser by it. He had an engagement with Allstyne and Starlett at the Idlers’ that afternoon, but they found him most preoccupied, and openly voted him a bore. He called on Agnes Elliston, but learned that she was out driving, and he savagely assured himself that he knew who was handling the reins. He dined at the Traders’, and, for the first time since he had begun to frequent that place, the creases in his brow were real.
Later in the evening he dropped around to see Biff Bates. In the very center of the gymnasium he found that gentleman engaged in giving a preliminary boxing lesson to a spider-like new pupil, who was none other than Silas Trimmer. Responding to Biff’s cheerful grin and Mr. Trimmer’s sheepish one with what politeness he could muster, Bobby glumly went home.
On the next morning occurred the first stock-holders’ meeting of the Burnit-Trimmer Merchandise Corporation, which Bobby attended with some feeling of importance, for, with his twenty-six hundred shares, he was the largest individual stock-holder present. That was what had reassured him overnight: the magic “majority of stock!” Mr. Trimmer only had twenty-four hundred, and Bobby could swing things as he pleased. His father, omniscient as he was, must certainly have failed to foresee this fact. In his simplicity of such matters and his general unsuspiciousness, Bobby had not calculated that if the additional six hundred shares were to vote solidly with Mr. Trimmer against him, his twenty-six hundred shares would be confronted by three thousand, and so rendered paltry.