old that he touched. It was
certain that he had captured the trade of the Road, and this move meant
that he had fastened his teeth in the trade of the roaring city. And
not so long ago people could remember when he was a common larrikin,
reputed leader of the Cardigan Street Push, and working for old Paasch,
whose shop was now empty, his business absorbed by Jonah with the ease
one swallows a lozenge. And they say he began life as a street-arab,
selling papers and sleeping in the gutter. Well, some people's luck
was marvellous!

The crowd became so dense that the police cleared a passage through it,
and the carts and buses slackened to a walk as they passed the shop,
where the electric lights glittered, the Chinese lanterns swung gaily
in the breeze, and the band struck noisily into the airs from a comic
opera.

Meanwhile the shop was crowded with customers, impatient to be served,
each carrying a coupon cut from the morning paper, which entitled the
holder to a pair of Jonah's Famous Silver Shoes at cost price. And
near the door, in an interval of business, stood the proprietor, a
hunchback, his grey eyes glittering with excitement at seeing his dream
realized, the huge shop, spick and span as paint could make it, the
customers jostling one another as they passed in and out, and the coin
clinking merrily in the till.

Yes, they were quite right. Everything that he touched turned to gold.
Outsiders confused his fortune with the luck of the man who draws the
first prize in a sweep, enriched without effort by a chance turn of
Fortune's wrist. They were blind to the unresting labour, the
ruthless devices that left his rivals gaping, and the fixed idea that
shaped everything to its needs. In five years he had fought his way
down the Road, his line of march dotted with disabled rivals.

Old Paasch, the German, had been his first victim. Bewildered and
protesting, he had succumbed to Jonah's novel methods of attack as a
savage goes down under the fire of machine-guns. His shop was closed
years ago, and he lived in a stuffy room, smelling vilely of
tobacco-smoke, where he taught the violin to hazardous pupils for
little more than a crust. He always spoke of Jonah with a vague terror
in his blue eyes, convinced that he had once employed Satan as an
errand-boy.

People were surprised to find that Jonah meant to live in the rooms
over the new shop, when he could well afford to take a private house in
the suburb