"Hah!" says he. "Then perhaps that balances the account."

Saying which, he clips the end off of a fat black perfecto, lights up,
and tackles the mornin' mail.




CHAPTER VII

TORCHY FOLLOWS A HUNCH

It was a case of local thunderstorms on the seventeenth floor of the
Corrugated Trust Building. To state it simpler, Old Hickory was
runnin' a neck temperature of 210 or so, and there was no tellin' what
minute he might fuse a collar-button or blow out a cylinder-head.

The trouble seemed to be that one of his pet schemes was in danger of
being ditched. Some kind of an electric power distributin' stunt it
is, one that he'd doped out durin' a Western trip last summer; just a
little by-play with a few hundred square miles of real estate,
includin' the buildin' of twenty or thirty miles of trolley and
plantin' a few factories here and there.

But now here's Ballinger, our Western manager, in on the carpet, tryin'
to explain why it can't be done. He's been at it for two hours, helped
out by a big consultin' engineer and the chief attorney of our Chicago
branch. They've waved blue-print maps, submitted reports of experts,
and put in all kinds of evidence to show that the scheme has either got