“Are you crazy?”
“Is everybody crazy that needs three hundred
dollars?”
“Yes,” Adams said. “They are
if they ask me for it, when I got to stretch
every cent I can lay my hands on to make it look like
a dollar!”
“You won’t do it?”
Adams burst out at him. “You little fool!
If I had three hundred dollars to throw away, besides
the pay I expected to give you, haven’t you
got sense enough to see I could hire a man worth three
hundred dollars more to me than you’d be?
It’s a fine time to ask me for three hundred
dollars, isn’t it! What for?
Rhinestone buckles to throw around on your ‘girl
friends?’ Shame on you! Ask me to bribe
you to help yourself and your own family!”
“I’ll give you a last chance,” Walter
said. “Either you do what I want, or I
won’t do what you want. Don’t ask
me again after this, because——”
Adams interrupted him fiercely. “‘Ask
you again!’ Don’t worry about that, my
boy! All I ask you is to get out o’ my
room.”
“Look here,” Walter said, quietly; and
his lopsided smile distorted his livid cheek.
“Look here: I expect you wouldn’t
give me three hundred dollars to save my life, would
you?”
“You make me sick,” Adams said, in his
bitterness. “Get out of here.”
Walter went out, whistling; and Adams drooped into
his old chair again as the door closed. “Oh,
my, my!” he groaned. “Oh, Lordy,
Lordy! The way of the transgressor——”
He meant his own transgression and his own way; for
Walter’s stubborn refusal appeared to Adams
just then as one of the inexplicable but righteous
besettings he must encounter in following that way.
“Oh, Lordy, Lord!” he groaned, and then,
as resentment moved him—“That dang
boy! Dang idiot!” Yet he knew himself
for a greater idiot because he had not been able to
tell Walter the truth. He could not bring himself
to do it, nor even to state his case in its best terms;
and that was because he felt that even in its best
terms the case was a bad one.
Of all his regrets the greatest was that in a moment
of vanity and tenderness, twenty-five years ago, he
had told his young wife a business secret. He
had wanted to show how important her husband was becoming,
and how much the head of the universe, J. A. Lamb,
trusted to his integrity and ability. The great
man had an idea: he thought of “branching
out a little,” he told Adams confidentially,
and there were possibilities of profit in glue.
What he wanted was a liquid glue to be put into little
bottles and sold cheaply. “The kind of
thing that sells itself,” he said; “the
kind of thing that pays its own small way as it goes
along, until it has profits enough to begin advertising
it right. Everybody has to use glue, and if I
make mine convenient and cheap, everybody’ll
buy mine. But it’s got to be glue that’ll
