Eagle River review. [volume] (Eagle River, Wis.) 1890-1927, 1911-07-21


a week, and who, in their own conf
Dental opinion, formed the backbone
and the stomach of the country's
| manufactures and trade
Now Longwood, whose printing and
binding plant had been cleaning up
its seven per cent. for a matter of
twenty years, since Longwood had
bought into it to become finally it's
sole proprietor, was one of the first
OF the little fellows for whom Bost-
wick telephoned in the early days &.
the panic and informed, with a wick
ed look in his close-set eyes and vic
1ous frown on his slanting forehead,
that they could not get another dollar
until they had '<cut down their dis
count to where they could see little
light"
Cutting down his discount" which,
in common human speech, means con-
verting credit into cash, was just
about as pleasing and as possible a
proposal for Longwood as would be
an invitation to eat up and digest the
| machinery in the ten prodigious sto-
| r1es of his own printing and binding
| plant. And Longwood, for the first
| time in his business career, was
learning what a panic really means
to the man who is compelled to crawl
into the bank on his knees, instead
Of walking into it with bag in his
hand and taking what he needs for
ready money transactions.
When Bostwick wanted to be mean
he would wrinkle up his face as if he
were trying to look at the sun. His
| raised upper lip displayed row of
yellow teeth, the general effect being
one Of depression in an iaf1nite de-
gree to the party who was second in
the contract
While the printer and binder was
| staring into the black abyss of abso-
lutte failure, he was simultaneously
| figuring on the close contiguity and
the quick continuity of the results
that he knew would follow the smash.
When you are kicked out into the
street a pauper at the age of fifty
five, with wife twenty years your
junior, who has stuck to you just for
the sake of the money, and who will
abandon you like a shot the very mo-
ment the touring car and the house
go up in the flames, and particularly
| when you have a little failing for the
liquor, the prospects are, if a financial
panic happens to be overshadowing
5 the world, that you will rapidly de-
generate into a greasy hobo, upon
whose mystic atmosphere Of total ir
resolution and of beds in strange
places neither gods nor men can
smile.
That was the way it came up to
Longwood, or at least that is the
way he told me it came. But as he
was swallowing the brackish thought,
and trying to reconcile himself to the
notion of that sort of thing as an ev-
| eryday diet, with the poorhouse and
the dissecting table at the end of it,
his attention was suddenly diverted
by the sight of Bostwicl1's right ear
The top Of the ear was customarily
obscured by the rather long hair Of
lions he had been making with his
hand Bostwick had accidentally
brushed the hair aside, and Long
| wood for the first time observed that
about half an inch of the top of the
ear was missing.
Longwood could hear Bostwick's
voice telling him about the reduction
of discount" and money on three's,"
and other things of the kind that
everybody talks about when a panic
is in the land, but he was not paying
| the slightest attention to what the
banker was saying. He was trying
with all the vigor Of his brain to re-
construct in his Imagination a thing
| the dim, gigantic outlines Of which
flung their shadows across the back
ground of his memory as if the thing
| itself had happened to him in a
| vague past in some other life on some
| other planet, thousand years. before
the world was created, when banks
were not and the reduction Of dis
| count was a theory yet to be tried.
In the very middle Of it he felt a
| strange apopletic choking and the on
| coming of storm in his head; and
when the storm and the choking had
cleared away he looked Bostwick
squarely in the eye and laughed
| aloud
"You think it's a joke, do your"
Bostwick said to him, with his solar
| grin and yellow teeth we'll to the
front "Well, you will dam soon find
| fhot n icp'f
He rose and began to finger the
! papers on his desk as clear invita-
ton to Longwood to take himself
away
"Bostwick," said Longwood, as II
he were recalling a pleasant little in
cident of a hunting trip in the Cana
| dian wi1ds, 'T wonder Whatever hap
| pened to the fellows that came that
time for the men of the Tropic Dawn?
I'm hanged if wouldn't like to
| know"
He had his evaS trained on BOSt-