The Rules of the Game | Page 7

not satisfied in my own mind. I can see you are
trying. Either you're a damn fool or this college education racket has
had the same effect on you as on most other young cubs. If you're the
son of your father, you can't be entirely a damn fool. If it's the college
education, that will probably wear off in time. Anyhow, I think I'll take
you up to the mill. You can try the office there. Collins is easy to get on

with, and of course there isn't the same responsibility there."
In the buffeting of humiliation Bob could not avoid a fleeting inner
smile over this last remark. Responsibility! In this sleepy, quiet
backwater of a tenth-floor office, full of infinite little statistics that led
nowhere, that came to no conclusion except to be engulfed in dark files
with hundreds of their own kind, aimless, useless, annoying as so many
gadflies! Then he set his face for the further remarks.
"Navigation will open this week," Fox's incisive tones went on, "and
our hold-overs will be moved now. It will be busy there. We shall take
the eight o'clock train to-night." He glanced sharply at Bob's lean, set
face. "I assume you'll go?"
Bob was remembering certain trying afternoons on the field when as
captain, and later as coach, he had told some very high-spirited boys
what he considered some wholesome truths. He was remembering the
various ways in which they had taken his remarks.
"Yes, sir," he replied.
"Well, you can go home now and pack up," said Fox. "Jim!" he shot
out in his penetrating voice; then to Harvey, "Make out Orde's check."
Bob closed his desk, and went into the outer office to receive his check.
Harvey handed it to him without comment, and at once turned back to
his books. Bob stood irresolute a moment, then turned away without
farewell.
But Archie followed him into the hall.
"I'm mighty sorry, old man," he whispered, furtively. "Did you get the
G.B.?"
"I'm going up to the mill office," replied Bob.
"Oh!" the other commiserated him. Then with an effort to see the best
side, "Still you could hardly expect to jump right into the head office at

first. I didn't much think you could hold down a job here. You see
there's too much doing here. Well, good-bye. Good luck to you, old
man."
There it was again, the insistence on the responsibility, the activity, the
importance of that sleepy, stuffy little office with its two men at work,
its leisure, its aimlessness. On his way to the car-line Bob stopped to
look in at an open door. A dozen men were jumping truck loads of
boxes here and there. Another man in a peaked cap and a silesia coat,
with a pencil behind his ear and a manifold book sticking out of his
pocket shouted orders, consulted a long list, marked boxes and
scribbled in a shipping book. Dim in the background huge freight
elevators rose and fell, burdened with the mass of indeterminate things.
Truck horses, great as elephants, magnificently harnessed with brass
ornaments, drew drays, big enough to carry a small house, to the
loading platform where they were quickly laden and sent away. From
an opened upper window came the busy click of many typewriters.
Order in apparent confusion, immense activity at a white heat, great
movement, the clanging of the wheels of commerce, the apparition and
embodiment of restless industry--these appeared and vanished, darted
in and out, were plain to be seen and were vague through the murk and
gloom. Bob glanced up at the emblazoned sign. He read the firm's
name of well-known wholesale grocers. As he crossed the bridge and
proceeded out Lincoln Park Boulevard two figures rose to him and
stood side by side. One was the shipping clerk in his peaked cap and
silesia coat, hurried, busy, commanding, full of responsibility; the other
was Harvey, with his round, black skull cap, his great, gold-bowed
spectacles, entering minutely, painstakingly, deliberately, his neat little
figures in a neat, large book.

IV
The train stopped about noon at a small board town. Fox and Bob
descended. The latter drew his lungs full of the sparkling clear air and
felt inclined to shout. The thing that claimed his attention most strongly
was the dull green band of the forest, thick and impenetrable to the

south, fringing into ragged tamaracks on the east, opening into a
charming vista of a narrowing bay to the west. Northward the land ran
down to sandpits and beyond them tossed the vivid white and blue of
the Lake. Then when his interest had detached itself from the
predominant note of the imminent wilderness, predominant less from
its physical size--for it lay in remote perspective--than from a certain
indefinable