unterson, following him,
smitten with vague valor and sudden fury, turned.

"You--you!" was all he said, at a loss for words in his anger, and the
President of the Salamander met him with a smile of humorous contempt.

"Why, hello!" he said, "here's Gunterson! Come to Boston to find a new
agent, I suppose. So did I, to tell the truth. Good luck, old man."

Mr. Gunterson turned his back on his tormentor, and passed on. He
could think of no appropriate retort. But the situation could not be
saved by any degree of repartee. Boston had voted for separation;
Silas Osgood and Company must resign the Guardian; and Samuel Gunterson
had made a humiliating failure of his quest.

Into his throbbing brain, however, a new idea had come, suggested by
O'Connor's taunt. A new agent! Why not? If the Osgood office,
consisting largely of Conference companies, was obliged to resign the
Guardian, there must be some other agency where non-Conference
companies predominated and where he could place the Guardian upon the
withdrawal of a Conference company. After all, the Osgood office was
not the only good agency in Boston. A new vigor fortified him--he
would find an agent for the Guardian who should excel the Osgood
connection as the sun outshines the moon.

In one office of perhaps more notoriety than prominence, though Mr.
Gunterson knew it not, at that very moment the matter was being
discussed.

"Well, Jake," said Sternberg, of Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy, "they've
passed it."

"What did I tell you?" demanded Jake Bloom. "Didn't I tell you them
Conference companies would get what they wanted? They got it, all
right. Now the question is, what do we get out of it?"

"What do you mean?" asked Sternberg, slowly. He was large and bald,
and had a dead-white, soft-looking, pock-marked face, while Bloom was
short, black, and untidy.

"Well, I mean for one thing, the Guardian gets thrown out of the Osgood
agency. They're on the street. Why shouldn't we get 'em?"

"Sure! Why not?" Sternberg rejoined with enthusiasm. "We've got to
get some one else in here before long or we'll be up in the air. I'm
afraid we've been salting some of our people too hard. It sort of
jarred me when the Spokane left us. We've got to do something pretty
quick. Now, how will we get at Gunterson? He don't know us."

"And a blame good thing he don't," said McCoy, with perfect frankness.
"A swell chance we'd have of landing the Guardian if