Part 10

"Indeed I shall take it, and cherish it, and polish it up myself every week--the beauty!"

She came back to her chair. They sat a moment in silence. Then Emma McChesney spoke musingly.

"So that was it." Buck looked up. "I sensed something--different. I didn't know. I couldn't explain it."

Buck passed a quick hand over his eyes, shook himself, sat up, erect and brisk again, and plunged, with a directness that was as startling as it was new in him, into the details of Middle Western business.

"Good!" exclaimed Emma McChesney.

"It's all very well to know that Featherlooms are safe in South America. But the important thing is to know how they're going in the corn country."

Buck stood up.

"Suppose we transfer this talk to my office. All the papers are there, all the correspondence--all the orders, everything. You can get the whole situation in half an hour. What's the use of talking when figures will tell you."

He walked swiftly over to the door and stood there waiting. Emma McChesney rose. The puzzled look was there again.

"No, that wasn't it, after all," she said.

"Eh?" said Buck. "Wasn't what?"

"Nothing," replied Emma McChesney.

"I'm wool-gathering this morning. I'm afraid it's going to take me a day or two to get back into harness again."

"If you'd rather wait, if you think you'll be more fit to-morrow or the day after, we'll wait. There's no real hurry. I just thought----"

But Mrs. McChesney led the way across the hall that separated her office from her partner's. Halfway across, she stopped and surveyed the big, bright, busy main office, with its clacking typewriters and rustle and crackle of papers and its air of concentration.

"Why, you've run up a partition there between Miss Casey's desk and the workroom door, haven't you?"

"Yes; it's much better that way."

"Yes, of course. And--why, where are the boys' desks? Spalding's and Hutchinson's, and--they're all gone!" She turned in amazement.

"Break it to me! Aren't we using traveling men any more?"

Buck laughed his low, pleasant laugh.

"Oh, yes; but I thought their desks belonged somewhere else than in the main office. They're now installed in the little room between the shop and Healy's office. Close quarters, but better than having them out here where they were inclined to neglect their reports in order to shine in the eyes of that pretty new stenographer. There are one or two other changes. I hope you'll approve of them."

"I'm sure I shall," replied Emma McChesney, a little stiffly.

In Buck's office, she settled back in her chair to watch him as he arranged neat sheaves of papers for her inspection. Her eyes traveled from his keen, eager face to the piles of paper and back again.

"Tell me, did you hit it off with the Ella Sweeneys and the Sadie Harrises of the great Middle West? Is business as bad as the howlers say it is? You said something last night about a novelty bifurcated skirt. Was that the new designer's idea? How have the early buyers taken to it?"

Buck crooked an elbow over his head in self-defense.

"Stop it! You make me feel like Rheims cathedral. Don't bombard until negotiations fail."

He handed her the first sheaf of papers. But, before she began to read: "I'll say this much. Miss Sharp, of Berg Brothers, Omaha--the one you warned against as the human cactus--had me up for dinner. Well, I know you don't, but it's true. Her father and I hit it off just like that. He's a character, that old boy. Ever meet him? No? And Miss Sharp told me something about herself that explains her porcupine pose. That poor child was engaged to a chap who was killed in the Spanish-American war, and she----"

"Kate Sharp!" interrupted Emma McChesney. "Why, T. A. Buck, in all her vinegary, narrow life, that girl has never had a beau, much less----"