it. It was fair to assume that most of them were concerned with the ascending cost of living, and that they reckoned with responsibilities toward others.

Herein lay the difference between Theron Wade and the great majority. He had no encumbrances; he had only himself to look out for. His computations concerned the cost of living, but only as it related to his bank balance. That was growing by an average of twenty dollars a week, saved from his salary of forty; he was determined that it should be no less as the weeks sped on. Those savings; he must guard them! Not for the relief of some fellow being, though he had relatives who needed some such practical attention. Just for their own sweet sake, he jealously schemed for the weekly additions that were swelling the thousand or two which, at twentyseven, he had managed to amass. The amount must not be cut down by the rising scale of living. But how hard the profiteering hounds were making it for a poor dog, to be sure! This was the reflection that lined his brow with pain as he turned into Exchange Street. The landlady had just advanced the weekly rent of his mean little room, in Exeter Place, by a half dollar. She had volubly explained, while tucking back a wisp of drab hair which straggled discouraged upon her forehead, that she just had to do it, costs were coming up so. Theron listened gloomily. Her troubles were nothing to him; there gleamed in his mind only the round, cold, hard fact of the extra half dollar.

There was no use in thinking of moving. He had selected his boarding place for the same reason he had chosen the shop of Tony Camapella. Mrs. Dustin was "easy," as was Camapella. If she were advancing him a half dollar, it was certain that every other lodging housekeeper in the neighborhood—which was not an expensive one-had "jumped" their lodgers anywhere from a dollar to two a week some time before timid Mrs. Dustin had dared to make the plunge. That room, once it had cost him three dollars, and now it was five-fifty! A lunch that in halcyon days had cost fifteen cents, now cost thirty or thirty-five! And laundry

there would have been that much more to cache with his savings in the Hailesborough Savings. Bank. Better late than never, though.

A faint grin tugged at his thin mouth, filled with teeth that required some overdue attention, only, dentists were profiteers, also. About this laundry business, now, every man could be to a reasonable extent his own mangler.

He

His underwear and socks, by all means. could slip into the bathroom at night, wash them, and hang them upon the hooks of his closet to dry. Yes, and his handkerchiefs and the soft collars. A soft collar looked mussed a little while after you buttoned it, anyhow. What was the matter with ironing them, while wet, with his fingers? They would dry, all right. Men had to pay altogether too much for a few strokes of a flatiron in these days. And on soft collars the laundries saved the price of the starch. Outrageous! But-no more.

Ambition surged within him. Why, not do his pajamas, also? Nobody would know. That would leave only his shirts to be sent out, as a regular thing. Reluctantly, he admitted that he had best not tackle them. He had to meet the landlady's advance of fifty cents. Now he foresaw a weekly saving of sixty, seventy cents, even more. A little thought had solved the problem. He was still safely inside the costs limit he had set for himself.

There are men who make "killings" in the stock market. They feel no keener thrill than now warmed Theron Wade, approaching daily toil with his hunch on home-done laundry, as a dampener on the high cost of living!

Theron Wade ascended in an elevator to the fourth floor and entered the computations suite where he had a desk. Here, as throughout the building, showed rich tiled floors spread with rugs, burlapped walls, the dull glow of mahogany. The Marathon had never done things by halves. This "waste" of good money had always given Wade twinges of disapproval. The interior of the offices could have been made as presentable for half the money, he believed. Why expend so much upon quarters in which folk spent not to exceed eight hours a day?

He turned to the window, looking over the valley studded with chimneys of varied quarters, those of factory sections and of handsome residential districts. Grave, lofty, surrounding hills were beginning to show the deep emerald of spring. Filmy patches of clouds, like the handkerchiefs of a goddess, sailed in the blue sky. Rare beauty-but Wade was not thinking of that. As nearly always, his thought turned inward. It reached out only for money.

That forty a week which he drew; he reflected rebelliously that it should be more. A month longer than a year he had been with the Marathon; they had increased his weekly salary five dollars in the fall, a general advance through the office made in deference to the increasing cost of living.

more.

passed, Wade stood scowling reflectively. To protect his ratio of savings, and perhaps to increase it, he had to have more money.

The office should pay him But he knew there would be no use in asking for it unless the powers were considering another general advance. And this, he considered doubtful, so soon.

He heard a stir in the outer office; evidently old Pratt had arrived. A tapping of light footsteps told, too, that Hannah Thomas, the stenographer, had come in. Then, as the silvery chime of the clock in Pratt's room began the toll of nine, a swinging tread approached his door.

Lambert Brill, his desk mate, entered the room. "Hello, Wadie," he called, as he tossed his hat on a hook in the wardrobe, and flung himself in the chair opposite Theron's at the long, flat mahogany desk. "Everything seems more'n rosy to-day!" he remarked.

Wade contrived a perfunctory smile and a monosyllabic answer. He wasn't for anybody, much, except Theron.

RILL stretched back in his chair with a

prodigious yawn, while he stared in enmity at some sheets of figures requiring immediate attention. "Too fine a day to be cooped up with this junk!" grumbled his resonant baritone. "Makes you feel like an old woman with her tatting! Wadie, wouldn't it give you a pain in the gizzard, if you had any?"

The good-natured mockery got no "rise" from Theron. Back in school days they had said he was about as sensitive to flings as a tortoise to mosquito stings. His cold gray eyes, bleakly lighting a hawk's profile, stared unblinkingly at Brill.

"It's work," replied his dry, precise voice. "We've got to work to live."

"I'd rather live than work," flippantly responded Lambert, yawning again. "Well, if I have to-" and with a prodigious sigh he languidly stretched forth a brown, stubby hand for the sheets of figures.

As he made ready to attack his own columns, preparatory to a session at the adding machine, Wade glanced at Brill, from under lowered lids, in a stealthy habit he had. That he did not care for Lambert was evident from this look. His mask of cool friendliness, assumed for Brill's face, was only that. The lightninglike look from the gray eyes had shown startling malice.

Yet the well-groomed, dark-skinned, tall young fellow, with coal-black hair brushed straight back, had never harmed Wade. Quite the contrary. At Pratt's request, Brill had broken him in to the work when he had come the year before. Two or three times Brill had asked him out to lunch and enabled him to save that much more during that particular week. He had never returned the courtesy; especially as Brill lunched at more expensive resorts than he frequented. The mere possibility of paying such a check, for two, would have caused his frugal soul intense pain.

Wade hated Brill because he was so wholly the antithesis of himself; just as some other persons hate each other because they are so much alike. Theron had found that Brill received five dollars a week more than he did; he hated him for that. He would have bet that Lambert lived weekly to the limit of his forty-fifth dollar; he wore good clothes; he had "breeze," sang froid, a careless twentieth-century nonchalance, hallmark of his twenty-six years.

More than these, he had a tolerant contempt for Wade's colorless mode of life and for his

many frugalities. This was never expressed in words, but Theron felt it. So he hated Brill in growing measure as weeks and months drifted by. The young men worked in silence for a few minutes. Then Walter Pratt, the chief of their division, entered. He was a drab, gray, little man in his dwindling fifties, soberly garbed like a preacher of the old school, hopelessly steeped in routine. His voice was dusty, like his eyes protected by thick, polished lenses.

"Brill, here's this new schedule proof to compare with the original. Read it very carefully, please, and I'd like to have it soon after lunch to send downstairs. There's been delay on it already."

He glided noiselessly upon rubber soles back into his office. The door swung shut behind him. From the basement, far below, came the muffled thunder of the presses, busy turning out the printed matter of diversified sales systems which were finding favor around the world.

AMBERT BRILL glowered at the sheets which Pratt had left, while he ran his fingers through tousled hair.

"Schedule proofs," he growled, though with a whimsical light in his eyes. "Soon after lunch. That makes a full day for me, all right, with the rest of it. And I had a little date for this morning, and another one for the afternoon!"

Theron looked up. There flashed into his memory other recent occasions when Brill had absented himself from the office upon outside business. To him came the beginnings of a plan of action, nebulous as yet, but stealthy. He spoke from sudden impulse.

"Keep your dates if you want to, Brill. I can manage that schedule proof, along with my work. I can get Miss Thomas to read the copy while I correct."

At the ring of eagerness in his tone Brill stared at him in justified surprise. The pace required of Pratt's two young assistants was not of the lash-driven order. He had often helped Wade, especially when he was breaking in. Never till this moment had Theron ever offered to relieve him, even in temporary interims when more than the usual quota of work had been thrust upon him.

The fellow must be growing human! Well, in that case, he should be encouraged! Brill grinned gratification.

"Why, thanks, old man!" as he handed Wade a couple of cigars. "That's decent of you! Do as much for you sometime. I'll manage to duck out after an hour, I think."

Greedily Wade pocketed the cigars, which were of quality better than twice his own.

A little after ten o'clock, Brill seized his hat and disappeared, saying he would be back about an hour after lunch. Wade worked steadily, and more rapidly than usual, so as to be abreast of his own work and the extra task of Brill's which he had taken upon himself.

There was a light in his eyes. But, it was not the warm glow of good fellowship. Rather, it was the icy sheen of self-seeking, like bleak sunlight upon ice.

At last he understood the impulse which had led him to offer to do a part of Brill's work, so as to allow him egress from the office during business hours. As the minutes ticked away he gloated in it. He had been looking for an opportunity to better his fortunes; to conserve his savings and to add to them. The chance was here, and now.

If a man didn't look out for himself, who was going to do it for him!

A face flitted through his mental vision as he worked at an increasing pace. It was not Brill's, nor Pratt's. It was the face of the man "higher up"; the cold, rocklike, keen-eyed face of the Marathon's new general manager, Talcott Storm.

That surname of "the boss" had struck young Wade as incongruous when the new arbiter had come from New York, six months before, to take the tiller. Rather, his aspect was as bleak and calm and uncompromising as a November day. A stickler for duty, for pace, for results; a man who interested himself in every department; who viewed at close range with the naked eye instead of afar through a telescope, he was emphatically the man for Wade's hour. He and Theron would understand each other!

So, while one hour glided into the next, and the work of the Marathon and of the rest of the work-a-day world went on, Theron Wade was doubly busy.

At the front of his brain reigned twin duties of the day, his own and the extra task of his office mate, which he had assumed. At the back, welling from dark chambers of the subconscious mind, rose dubious vapors which coalesced in a saffron-hued scheme.

That plan, if carried out as Wade desired, would financially benefit him—and Lambert Brill not at all.

Wade

Talcott Storm looked up from the loaded but well-ordered mahogany desk in the center of the most ornate office Theron had ever seen. caught a fleeting impression of a sturdy, mediumsized figure that could not have been tailored inside of a couple of hundred dollars. That soft silk collar and the loosely knotted tie, they must have together required fifteen. And, if he had time to think of them, the probable cost of those polished russet shoes and brown silken hose, matching the suit, would have filled him with disapproving horror.

It was like Wade, when meeting a man for the first time, to lower his gaze and to meet his eyes last. So, when after a fleeting instant, his look met Storm's he felt sudden perturbation new in his experience. For his gaze had traveled upward, from sordid details of polished shoes and clothing of dark, rich sheen like the mahogany's luster, to two living, brilliant, disconcerting eyes.

Never had Wade previously remarked, in seeing Storm from a distance, the penetrating quality of those eyes. With the detachment of cold steel, they seemed to look, from under somewhat narrowed lids, right through one.

"Well?" prompted Talcott Storm, as Theron seemed rooted before his desk. No shadow of impatience showed in his thin, ruddy, shaven face, the visage of a healthy, coördinated, poised man in the full flood of matured powers. He was somewhere in the forties; thin gray hair was brushed straight back upon a symmetrical head.

His voice, a part of his controlled personality, exuded neither warmth nor coldness, but only polite inquiry. Somehow it proved further disconcerting to Wade, who had been so sure of himself when he had asked at the switchboard for this interview.

"I-I-sir,-I can save you money," he asserted, rather lamely.

Storm's thin lips relaxed in a slight, grim smile. He indicated a chair at the side of his desk. "We're always glad to entertain suggestions pertaining to that matter. Sit down, Mr. Wade, and tell me about it. Something about Mr. Pratt's department, I assume?"

The slight smile had sufficed to reassure Theron. He slid into the chair with passing wonderment. He was but one of many cogs in that big wheel of business, and he had merely given his name to the switchboard girl, with no reference to the department. Yet Storm had placed him. Nobody saw him around overmuch, but he evidently had the business at his fingers' ends. And he was a stickler for efficiency, for production, for devotion to the job.

(Continued on page 139)