“I think you are very selfish not to help us out, Uncle Dan,” declared Agnes. “With all your experience you ought to be able to suggest something for Bobby to go into that would be a nice business and perfectly safe and make him lots of money without requiring too much experience to start with.”
“Young lady,” said Uncle Dan severely, “if I knew a business of that kind I’d sell some of the stock of my factory and go into it myself; but I don’t. The fact is, there are no business snaps lying around loose. You have to make one, and that takes not just money, but work and brains.”
“I’m perfectly willing to work,” declared Bobby.
“And you don’t mean to say that he hasn’t brains!” objected Agnes.
“No-o-o,” admitted Uncle Dan. “I am quite sure that Bobby has brains, but they have not been quite—a—a—well, say solidified, yet. You’re not allowed to smoke in this parlor, Bobby. Mrs. Elliston wants a quiet home game of whist; sent me to bring you up.”
Secretly, old Dan Elliston was himself puzzling a great deal over a career for Bobby, but up to the moment had not found anything that he thought safe to propose. Not having a good idea he was averse to discussing any project whatsoever, and so, each time that he was consulted upon the subject, he was as evasive as this about it, and Bobby each morning dragged perplexedly into the handsome offices of the defunct Applerod Addition, where Applerod and Johnson were still working a solid eight hours a day to straighten out the affairs of that unfortunate venture.
Those offices were the dullest quarters Bobby knew, for they contained nothing but the dead ashes of bygone money; but one morning business picked up with a jerk. He found a mine investment agent awaiting him when he arrived, and before he was through with this clever conversationalist a man was in to get him to buy a racing stable. Affairs grew still more brisk as the morning wore on. Within the next two hours he had politely but firmly declined to buy a partnership in a string of bucket shops, to refinance a defunct irrigation company, to invest in a Florida plantation, to take a tip on copper, and to back an automobile factory which was to enter business upon some designs of a new engine stolen by a discharged workman.
“How did all these people find out that I have two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to invest?” impatiently demanded Bobby, after he had refused the allurements of a patent-medicine scheme, the last of that morning’s lot.
There followed a dense silence, in the midst of which old Johnson looked up from the book in which he was entering a long, long list of items on the wrong side of the profit and loss account, and jerked his lean thumb angrily in the direction of Applerod.
“Ask him,” he said.