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not have the same flavor. Tommy makes a brisk business of doing nothing. And there is something sour and destructive about Warren Dodge’s inertia.
    Tommy had said only a few words to Warren, but they had taken the edge of his belligerence away.
    “Be good,” Tommy said. “Be good to our Sam Glidden. He is a member of the family. I shall now go forward and trade lies with my fellow intrepid bird-men and beg a chance to hand-fly this raunchy old craft.”
    After Tommy had gone forward, Warren turned back toward me, and I could guess from his expression that he was going to be sincere and earnest.
    “It’s like this, Sam. I figure this is our chance for Harrison to go big time. If we get under Mike Dean’s wing, it’s going to help us a lot. If we go big time, we could have an executive airplane like this one.”
    “And that would be handy, I suppose.”
    “Certainly. Louise and I have a big enough block of stock so I don’t understand, Sam, why I haven’t been put on the Board. I don’t see why Walt Burgeson should be voting our stock.”
    His childish picture of himself was all too vivid. Warren Dodge, member of the Board of Directors of the Harrison Corporation, flew to Chicago yesterday to attend an industry conference.
    But it was a little too late for Warren Dodge.
    It was too late for him by the time he got out of Princeton, because by then he had learned what he could procure with nothing but a boyish grin and the bulge of tennis muscles.
    “It might be a good idea for you to be on the Board, Warren,” I said. “Al Dolson and I are responsible to the Board, and so are the other corporate officers. We like to have people on the Board who understand the special problems we’re facing. When we get back I’d be glad to arrange it so that you can come in and work in the various divisions of the company and get the whole picture.”
    He gave me an uneasy glance. “What kind of work?”
    “Start you off as a stock chaser. That’s the fastest way to learn. In about eighteen months you’d have a pretty good background.”
    He nodded dubiously and said something about getting another leg to stand on, and went back to Ricky’s department with his empty glass.
    “That wasn’t very kind, Sam,” Louise said.
    “I mean it seriously. If he’ll come in, I think it would be good for him.”
    “It must be nice to sit way up there and look down upon all of us and decide what’s good for us.”
    I felt my face get hot. “I didn’t mean it to sound that way. I just meant that…”
    “You meant that he does nothing and that makes you uneasy because everybody should be brisk and industrious like you.”
    “Damn it, Louise, you don’t…”
    She smiled in a tired way. “Sorry. Pay absolutely no attention.” She hitched her chair toward the window and began to look down at the green and misted earth below, and I knew I had been dismissed.
    Puss was across the way playing solitaire at a small table. After one venture into the whisky sour area, she was back to her normal brandy on the rocks. I went over and sat opposite her and said, “Black ten on the red jack.”
    “Oh, I know all about that, Sam. I’m saving it for when there isn’t anything else left to do. How about some gin?” Tommy was up front between the pilots, bending over them and talking. Warren had sat down in the rear of the plane and was looking at a magazine. Louise was looking out the window, and her look of holiday had faded.
    “For how much?” I asked Puss.
    She bit her lip. “Hmmm. How interesting do we want to make it? Dime a point?”
    “That’s too damn interesting. That would make my hands sweat. A nickel?”
    “Done. Cut for deal.”
    By the time Ricky served lunch, I was a hundred and eighty-eight dollars to the good and she was furious at me, at the cards and at herself. She is a girl with a highly developed competitive instinct. By the time we made the gas stop she had gotten forty dollars back and she was bored with the