"Yes," I growled, "and there's nothing I'd enjoy more than handing
it to them!" And then the telephone-bell rang.

The assistant secretary answered, and as I watched him, I saw his
jaw drop and his face go white. "My God!" he exclaimed as he hung
up the receiver as one in a trance. "It can't be!"

"What?" I asked.

"Mr. Tyler is dead," he answered in a dull voice. "He died at sea,
suddenly, yesterday."

The next ten days were occupied in burying Mr. Bowen J. Tyler, Sr.,
and arranging plans for the succor of his son. Mr. Tom Billings,
the late Mr. Tyler's secretary, did it all. He is force, energy,
initiative and good judgment combined and personified. I never
have beheld a more dynamic young man. He handled lawyers, courts
and executors as a sculptor handles his modeling clay. He formed,
fashioned and forced them to his will. He had been a classmate of
Bowen Tyler at college, and a fraternity brother, and before, that
he had been an impoverished and improvident cow-puncher on one of the
great Tyler ranches. Tyler, Sr., had picked him out of thousands
of employees and made him; or rather Tyler had given him the
opportunity, and then Billings had made himself. Tyler, Jr., as
good a judge of men as his father, had taken him into his friendship,
and between the two of them they had turned out a man who would
have died for a Tyler as quickly as he would have for his flag. Yet
there was none of the sycophant or fawner in Billings; ordinarily
I do not wax enthusiastic about men, but this man Billings comes
as close to my conception of what a regular man should be as any