The other boys, of course, jumped up and gathered in a ring. "Fight! Fight!" was yelled by a hundred throats, as all rushed to where the now angry combatants faced each other. Jack stood poised on one foot ready for any emergency. All at once he spied the crony of the "bully" sneaking through the crowd of boys to get behind his chum. When the latter saw his "pal" his courage increased wonderfully, but ere he had time to put into execution the thoughts uppermost in his mind, Jack made a feint, a step back and then a lunge ahead with a right-hand smash just as he had seen his father hit the board, and the "bully" lay at his feet writhing and kicking in defeat.
Whittaker took the licking very much to heart, and he carried a scar on his lip, caused by Jack's blow, to his grave. Jack heard occasionally that the "bully" had sworn to "get even," but as time passed and their pursuits carried them into opposing channels, Whittaker soon became a school-day reminiscence and later was not even remembered by name.
Jack's school days came to an end and he went into his father's mill to work, learning the various methods of flour manufacture and manner of marketing the product. The business did not seem to take his fancy. "Something wrong in the industry," he would often say to the boss miller. "Here you work this mill day and night, turn out three hundred barrels of flour every twenty-four hours, yet lose money on the product half the time. Six months of the year is a loss, but none of the mill owners can give the reason why."
"You're right, kid; but that ain't nothin' to me to figger out. I've been dressin' mill stones an' cuttin' them burrs ever since I was your age, an' it's allus been the same. Sometimes it's the wheat, sometimes the weather, but in the end it's as you say. P'raps it's the farmer, who asks too big a price."
"No, it's not any one of those causes," said Jack, meditatively. "It's that big engine down there eating up coal and the carrying charge to get the flour to market. That's what ails the business. Look, now; see that farmer with a load of wheat on the scales. There's father out there taking a handful out of one sack and a cupful out of another. (Look out, dad, you may strike a nest of screenings shot into the middle of one of those sacks with a stove pipe.) He's bought the load and now it's going into the hopper, where it will in all probability be mixed with inferior grades. Then people complain the flour is no good, and you grind up a lot of corn meal and feed it back into the flour, or regrind with some middlings, until one can't tell whether it is flour or hog feed, and where are the profits? Now, let me tell you. I was listening the other day to that little alderman over in the second ward. He was talking politics and business, and when he was not roasting 'Bob' Ingersoll or General Grant he was making fun of Illinois River millers. He said—and you know what a big voice the little fellow has—he said this: 'There's a town up by St. Anthony's Falls that will turn out more flour in a day than we turn out in a week, and you know we are some pumpkins with our flour barrels, ain't we?'"
"Say, kid, you're sure of what you just said?" asked the miller, interestedly.
"Sure as I live," replied Jack; "why?"
"Well, I'm goin' up to see that bit of water near St. Paul."
"The nearest town is Minneapolis, a little suburb of St. Paul," answered Jack, remembering his geography lessons.
Between oiling machinery, sacking bran, sewing flour sacks, heading barrels, sweeping, and occasionally "learning his trade," as he called it, over in the cooper shop, Jack got to be pretty well posted on the manufacture of flour, but he did not like the business and finally gave it up, deciding to take up the mercantile sphere and quit the field wherein the foundations of the most gigantic fortunes were just ready for the superstructure—flour, oil, harvest machinery and provisions, to say nothing of the contributory railway and telegraph business. He went to Boston, secured a position in a large wholesale establishment, lived in one of the beautiful suburban cities which surround the "Hub" on three sides, and there learned the lessons of prudence, sharp buying and economical, labor-saving methods, which were in contrast with the wastefulness and unsystematic methods prevalent in the great west. Not long after Jack was well established his father packed up the family belongings and moved where he could be with his son.