eggett read the wire through twice, and then folded it and put it
into his pocket. He rose and walked toward the managing editor's room.
As he stepped across the floor there was a little dancing light in his
eyes, there was a faint smile upon his lips, that were quite foreign to
the staid and sober Cleggett that the world knew. He was quiet, but he
was almost jaunty, too; he felt a little drunk, and enjoyed the feeling.

He opened the managing editor's door with more assurance than he had
ever displayed before. The managing editor, a pompous, tall, thin man
with a drooping frosty mustache, and cold gray eyes in a cold gray face
that somehow reminded one of the visage of a walrus, was preparing to
go home.

"Well?" he said, shortly.

He was a man for whom Cleggett had long felt a secret antipathy. The
man was, in short, the petty tyrant of Cleggett's little world.

"Can you spare me a couple of minutes, Mr. Wharton?" said Cleggett.
But he did not say it with the air of a person who really sues for a
hearing.

"Yes, yes--go on." Mr. Wharton, who had risen from his chair, sat down
again. He was distinctly annoyed. He was ungracious. He was usually
ungracious with Cleggett. His face set itself in the expression it
always took when he declined to consider raising a man's salary.
Cleggett, who had been refused a raise regularly every three months for
the past two years, was familiar with the look.

"Go on, go on--what is it?" asked Mr. Wharton unpleasantly, frowning
and stroking the frosty mustache, first one side and then the other.

"I just stepped in to tell you," said Cleggett quietly, "that I don't
think much of the way you are running the Enterprise."

Wharton stopped stroking his mustache so quickly and so amazedly that
one might have thought he had run into a thorn amongst the hirsute
growth and pricked a finger. He glared. He opened his mouth. But
before he could speak Cleggett went on:

"Three years ago I made a number of suggestions to you. You treated me
contemptuously--very contemptuously!"

Cleggett paused and drew a long breath, and his face became quite red.
It was as if the anger in which he could not afford to indulge himself
three years before was now working in him with cumulative effect.
Wharton, only partially recovered from the shock of Cleggett's sudden
arraignment, began to stammer and bluster, using the words nearest his
tongue:

"You d-damned im-p-pertinent------"

"Just a m