uspicions of him I might have by offering to share his quarters with me
until I should have found suitable accommodations.

The poor fellow was completely at my mercy and I not only forbore,
generously, to press my advantage, but made him vicepresident of the
newly reorganized concern, permitting him to buy back a portion of the
stock he had sold. The boom in the market having sent our shares up to
an abnormal 1/2, we flooded our brokers with selling offers, at the same
time spreading rumors--by no means exaggerated--of the firm's
instability, buying back control when Consolidated Pemmican reached its
norm of 1/16. We made no fortunes on this transaction, but I was enabled
to look ahead to a year on a more comfortable economic level than ever
before.

But it was by no means in my plans merely to continue to milk the
corporation. I am, I hope, not without vision, and I saw Consolidated
Pemmican under my direction turned into an active and flourishing
industry. Its very decrepitude, I reasoned, was my opportunity; starting
from scratch and working with nothing, I would build a substantial
structure.

One of the new businesses which had sprung up was that of personally
conducted tours of the grass. After the experience of Gootes and myself,
parachute landings had been ruled out as too hazardous, but someone
happily thought of the use of snowshoes and it was on these clumsy means
that tourists, at a high cost and at less than snail's pace, tramped
wonderingly over the tamed menace.

My thought then, as I explained to Fles, was to reactivate the factory
and sell my product to the sightseers. Food, high in calories and small
in bulk, was a necessity on their excursions and nourishing pemmican
high in protein quickly replaced the cloying and messy candybar. We made
no profit, but we suffered no loss and the factory was in actual
operation so that no snoopers could ever accuse us of selling stock in
an enterprise with a purely imaginary existence.

I liked New York; it accorded well with my temperament and I wondered
how I had ever endured those weary years far from the center of the
country's financial life, its theaters and its great human drama. Give
me the old Times Square and the East Fifties any day and you can keep
Death Valley and functional architecture. I was at home at last and I
foresaw a future of slow but sure progress toward a position of
eminence and respectability. The undignified days of Miss Francis and