“You are earlier than usual,” she said. “I hope you have good news. I don't think he can stand it much longer. I have never seen him so much troubled in my life. His pride is cut to the quick. He has always thought he could cope with trickery in any form, and being helpless this way under the taunts of those men is fairly killing him. If he was thoroughly at himself he might hold his own, but he is getting old, and being mad this way really keeps him from using his best judgment.”
“No, nothing has turned up yet,” Fred told her; “but I thought I'd speak to him before supper.”
“Well, he'll be glad to see you, anyway,” the woman said, plaintively. “He thinks a lot of you, Fred--in fact, we both do. He has often said he blesses the day you came to him. He is lying down on the lounge in your room. Some of the neighbors were in just now chattering about the thing, and he slipped up there to keep from hearing what was said.”
Fred found his employer stretched out at full length on a lounge in the big, light room which he had occupied for over two years.
“Oh,” Whipple said, “it's you! Well, has anything turned up--I mean--but I know nothing has. Nothing can succeed against a gang of plotting, ungrateful dogs like they are. I've boosted 'em up through every panic and hard spell that come, keeping some of 'em afloat when they didn't have a dollar in their pockets, and now they not only knife me, but they make a public joke of it.”
“Mr. Whipple, I've been trying to think of some way to--”
“Oh, you _have?_ Well, spit it out!--spit it out!” And the merchant suddenly threw his feet around and sat up, clutching the edge of the lounge with his big hands, while he stared anxiously from dilating eyes that were all but bloodshot.
“Of course, I hesitate to--” Fred began modestly, but was interrupted by Whipple.
“Hesitate!--hesitate the devil! It is always that way with you, although you've got the safest, soundest judgment of any young man in the West. You hesitated to tell me you thought San Antonio would be a good place to put an agent, and it has proved the biggest opening we ever had. You hesitated before advising me against that Eastern salt company that had been sucking my blood for years before you came and smelt out their thievery. You hesitated to--but, darn it, quit hesitating! This is no time to hesitate; we are in a dirty fight, and twenty yellow dogs are on top of us gnawing the meat from our bones.”