hen he sez, "What do you mean by that?"

"Why," sez Dick, "you ain't makin' two percent profit, an' I was just
wonderin' what you stayed here for--if it wasn't for somethin' else
beside the filthy looger."

Jabez, he jumps to his feet an' goes all through it again, tellin' all
he has took in an' all he has paid out; while Dick kept attendin' to
his pots an' pans the same as if he was stone deaf. Jabez rattled on an
ended up with: "An' this here ranch has the best water an' the best
range an' the best shelter of any ranch in the state. What do you think
of that?"

"Why, I think it all the more reason why it should pay a business
profit," drawls Dick. "Only last week I heard you complainin' somethin'
fierce because you had to put up for a new freight-wagon. The great
trouble with you is that you don't have no system. You need a manager,
a man who takes an interest in modern progress, a man who sees that the
rest o' the men pay a profit. I don't mean a foreman, you got plenty o'
them. I mean a business man. You ain't no business man; you don't like
it."

Well, Jabez was stupefied. He'd never had no wage-earner dump advice on
him before, an' here was a tramp, as you might say, who started in by
telling him that what he really needed was some one to run his business
for him. He didn't fly up through. He just rose an' gave Dick a
searchin' look, an' then he meandered up to the house; an' you could
tell by the very droop of his shoulders that what he was doin' was
thinkin'.

The upshot of it was that when Flappy was hauled out to the ranch the
next week, an' as soon as he got so he could tell fire from water, Dick
fitted up an office in the North wing; an' about fifteen minutes
afterward we all felt the difference. From that on everything ran like
a round-up. Dick didn't boss none, he just pointed out the best way,
an' we did it. All those answers we had told him about calves an'
winter hay an' such-like had simply gone in one ear--an' stuck to the
inside of his mental gearing. He discovered that Jabez had been stuck
for further orders on most of his supplies, an' had allus managed to
win the bottom price whenever it came his turn to make a sale.

Well, Dick was a perpetual surprise party. You could tell by the color
of his skin that he was an indoor man; but he sat a hoss like a cow
puncher, an' as soon as he got things runnin' to suit him on our place
he got to makin' side trips to the other ranches. He would spend tw