The Nevada County picayune., 1911-07-21

| and the stomach of the country 8
 manufactures and trade.
 Now Longwood, whose printing and 1 binding plant had been cleaning up l its seven per cent. for a matter of | twenty years, since Longwood had l bought into it to become finally it's l solo proprietor was one of the first | of the little fellows for whom Bost-
 wick telephoned in the early days t, the panic and informed, with a wick l ed look in his close-set eyes and a vic 1 ious 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, l in common human speech, means con verting credit into cash, was just about as pleasing and as possible proposal for Longwood as would be an invitation to eat up and digest the machinery in the ten prodigious sto- | ries 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 1t with a 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 to hn Iic raised upper lip displayed a row of yellow teeth, the general effect being one of depression in an infinite de- gree to the party who was second in the contract.
 While the printer and binder was staring into the black abyss of abso- lute 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 a 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 little failing for the liquor. the prospects are, if financial panic happens to be overshadowing the world, that you will rapidly de- generate into 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 BostWick's right ear The top of the ear was customarily obscured by the rather long hair of the banker, and in the careless mo tions 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 tke 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, a 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 1t he felt 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 you?' Bostwick said to him. with his solar grin and yellow teeth we'll to the front Well. you will dam soon find that it isn't"
 He rose and began to finger the papers on his desk as clear invita- tion to Longwood to take himself away.
 "Bostwiek," said Longwood, as If he were recalling a pleasant little in cident of a hunting trip In the Cana dian wilds, "I wonder whatever hap pened 10 the fellows that came that time for the men of the Tropic Dawn? I'm hanged if I wouldn't like to