Part 20

Bud pinched enough postage stamps to make it Four Twenty Five.

Time went on.

And on.

Clarence built up a record for piety, punctuality, faithful fidoism and fussy attention to details that made every aspiring clerk in the place eat the carrot of envy every time they thought of him and his little kuppenheimer.

Bud was the only one who couldn’t see even a dim outline of Clarence’s sterling virtues.

His psychology was as different from Clarence’s “as day is from night,” to put it originally yet cleverly.

Bud was a wrecker of rules and a punisher of precedent.

He couldn’t see where certain non-essential things cut any large and influential ice in the great game of Business.

And he voiced his views with such hobnailed frankness that Clarence daily expected to see Bud popped from the Payroll.

He cautioned Bud repeatedly in a patronizing high tenor to censor his stuff or be prepared for the Hiking Certificate.

Time went on some more.

Bud still stuck.

The predictions of Clarence and all the other starchy little stallers proved to be punk and peanutty.

Comrade Boss seemed to take considerable shine to Bud, but none of the tall-collared gentry could get it at all.

Bud didn’t smoke his cigarettes around in the alley. And he played billiards on the Sabbath. And his business letters lacked dignity they said, although the stuff got over.

The reason the Boss liked Bud can be explained very simply, without the aid of music, motion pictures or other contraptions calculated to emphasize and impress.

The reason was this: Bud had IDEAS.

Now an idea is something that only Individuals are susceptible to. Persons never contract them.

Bud was an Individual. The rest of the Office Staff was an office staff.

If an idea had ever wandered in among them, it would have been unable to establish its identity. Nobody would have known the stranger at all.

Bud didn’t see why things should be done a certain way just because old man Noah did them that way.

Nor why a business letter should throb with about as much human interest as a Report on Weights and Measures, just because it was called a business letter.

Bud was also dead set against office stalling.

He never threw the bluff that he was all fevered up with work when he wasn’t doing anything but tinker with a hangnail.

And when he worked on a job, he worked to produce, not to prolong.

Further, Bud declined to have it in for the Boss simply because he was the Boss. And at every session of the Rappers’ League he was as open about it as a woman with a secret.

All these things Burra Boss quietly eyed-in from time to time, as Bosses have the lowdown habit of doing.

And so one bright Spring Morning about eleven minutes past ten he called Bud into the Throne Room.