“Outside?” exclaimed the manager. “How did he get here?”
“Came in on the mule train this morning: says he can do the work and wants the job.”
“What’s he like?” asked the manager.
The junior shook his head.
“Pretty dusty looking customer,” he said. “Shifty looking.”
“Same old story,” murmured the manager. “It’s odd how these fellows drift down here, isn’t it? Up to something crooked at home, I suppose. Understands the working of a bank, eh? I guess he understands it a little too well for my taste. No, no,” he continued, tapping the papers that lay on the table, “now that we’ve got a first-class man like Tomlinson, let’s hang on to him. We can easily wait ten days, and the cost of the journey is nothing to the bank as compared with getting a man of Tomlinson’s stamp. And, by the way, you might telephone to the Chief of Police and get him to see to it that this loafer gets out of town straight off.”
So the Chief of Police shut up Tomlinson in the calaboose and then sent him down to Mexico City under a guard. By the time the police were done with him he was dead broke, and it took him four months to get back to Toronto; when he got there, the place in Mexico had been filled long ago.
But I can imagine that some of my readers might suggest that I have hitherto been dealing only with success in a very limited way, and that more interest would lie in discussing how the really great fortunes are made.
Everybody feels an instinctive interest in knowing how our great captains of industry, our financiers and railroad magnates made their money.
Here the explanation is really a very simple one. There is, in fact, only one way to amass a huge fortune in business or railway management. One must begin at the bottom. One must mount the ladder from the lowest rung. But this lowest rung is everything. Any man who can stand upon it with his foot well poised, his head erect, his arms braced and his eye directed upward, will inevitably mount to the top.