"Remember," Jim Wright reminded him, "he is an efficiency expert extraordinary. The big boss seems to have confidence in him."
"He won't have quite so much," said Mr. Perrine, "when he hears that he put an elevator man in as cashier. I hear he walked off with six hundred dollars before he'd been on the job an hour."
Horace pricked up his ears. He made the car go as slowly as possible.
"He did?" Jim Wright was excited. "And this is one of the boss' bad days too! Just before I left him he was saying, 'The Amalgamated has about as much system as a piece of cheese. Why, these high-salaried executives can't tell me how much it costs them to make and sell a cake of soap!'"
Then Horace reluctantly let them out of the elevator at the street floor.
All that afternoon he struggled with an impulse. The words of Mr. Cowan's oration of the night before began to come back to him. If only he had obeyed his impulses——
As he was a new man, they gave him the late shift. At one minute to six the indicator in his car gave two short, sharp, peremptory buzzes. Horace, who was mastering the elements of elevator operating, shot up to the eighteenth floor. A single passenger got on. With a little gasp Horace recognized the cutaway coat and top hat of the president of the Amalgamated.
Horace set his teeth. His small frame grew tense. He turned the lever and the car started to glide downward. Seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve! Then with a quick twist of his wrist Horace stalled the car between the twelfth and eleventh floors and slipped the controlling key into his pocket. Then he turned and faced the big president.
"You don't know a hell of a lot about running an elevator," remarked Oren Hammer.
"No, I don't," said Horace Nimms in a strange, loud voice that he didn't recognize. "But I do know how much it costs a cake to make Pink Petal Toilet."