They used to do it much more picturesquely. They rode in coats of scarlet, in the crisp, clear morning, to the winding of horns and the baying of hounds, to the thud-thud of hoofs, and the crackle of underbrush. Across fresh-plowed fields they went, crashing through forest paths, leaping ditches, taking fences, scrambling up the inclines, pelting down the hillside, helter-skelter, until, panting, wide-eyed, eager, blood-hungry, the hunt closed in at the death.

The scarlet coat has sobered down to the somber gray and the snuffy brown of that unromantic garment known as the business suit. The winding horn is become a goblet, and its notes are the tinkle of ice against glass. The baying of hounds has harshened to the squawk of the motor siren. The fresh-plowed field is a blue print, the forest maze a roll of plans and specifications. Each fence is a business barrier. Every ditch is of a competitor\'s making, dug craftily so that the clumsy-footed may come a cropper. All the romance is out of it, all the color, all the joy. But two things remain the same: The look in the face of the hunter as he closed in on the fox is the look in the face of him who sees the coveted contract lying ready for the finishing stroke of his pen. And his words are those of the hunter of long ago as, eyes a-gleam, teeth bared, muscles still taut with the tenseness of the chase, he waves the paper high in air and cries, "I\'ve made a killing!"

For two years Jock McChesney had watched the field as it swept by in its patient, devious, cruel game of Hunt the Contract. But he had never been in at the death. Those two years had taught him how to ride; to take a fence; to leap a ditch. He had had his awkward bumps, and his clumsy falls. He had lost his way more than once. But he had always groped his way back again, stumblingly, through the dusk. Jock McChesney was the youngest man on the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company\'s big staff of surprisingly young men. So young that the casual glance did not reveal to you the marks that the strain of those two years had left on his boyish face. But the marks were there.

Nature etches with the most delicate of points. She knows the cunning secret of light and shadow. You scarcely realize that she has been at work. A faint line about the mouth, a fairy tracing at the corners of the eyes, a mere vague touch just at the nostrils—and the thing is done.

Even Emma McChesney\'s eyes—those mother-eyes which make the lynx seem a mole—had failed to note the subtle change. Then, suddenly, one night, the lines leaped out at her.

They were seated at opposite sides of the book-littered library table in the living-room of the cheerful up-town apartment which was the realization of the nightly dream which Mrs. Emma McChesney had had in her ten years on the road for the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company. Jock McChesney\'s side of the big table was completely covered with the mass of copy-paper, rough sketches, photographs and drawings which make up an advertising lay-out. He was bent over the work, absorbed, intent, his forearms resting on the table. Emma McChesney glanced up from her magazine just as Jock bent forward to reach a scrap of paper that had fluttered away. The lamplight fell full on his face. And Emma McChesney saw. The hand that held the magazine fell to her lap. Her lips were parted slightly. She sat very quietly, her eyes never leaving the face that frowned so intently over the littered table. The room had been very quiet before—Jock busy with his work, his mother interested in her magazine. But this silence was different. There was something electric in it. It was a silence that beats on the brain like a noise. Jock McChesney, bent over his work, heard it, felt it, and, oppressed by it, looked up suddenly. He met those two eyes opposite.

"Spooks? Or is it my godlike beauty which holds you thus? Or is my face dirty?"

Emma McChesney did not smile. She laid her magazine on the table, face down, and leaned forward, her staring eyes still fixed on her son\'s face.

"Look here, young \'un. Are you working too hard?"

"Me? Now? This stuff you mean—?"

"No; I mean in the last year. Are they piling it up on you?"

Jock laughed a laugh that was nothing less than a failure, so little of real mirth did it contain.

"Piling it up! Lord, no! I wish they would. That\'s the trouble. They don\'t give me a chance."

"A chance! Why, that\'s not true, son. You\'ve said yourself that there are men who have been in the office three times as long as you have, who never have had the opportunities that they\'ve given you."

It was as though she had touched a current that thrilled him to action. He pushed back his chair and stood up, one hand thrust into his pocket, the other passing quickly over his head from brow to nape with a quick, nervous gesture that was new to him.

"And why!" he flung out. "Why! Not because they like the way I part my hair. They don\'t do business that way up there. It\'s because I\'ve made good, and those other dubs haven\'t. That\'s why. They\'ve let me sit in at the game. But they won\'t let me take any tricks. I\'ve been an apprentice hand for two years now. I\'m tired of it. I want to be in on a killing. I want to taste blood. I want a chance at some of the money—real money."

Emma McChesney sat back in her chair and surveyed the angry figure before her with quiet, steady eyes.

"I might have known that only one thing could bring those lines into your face, son." She paused a moment. "So you want money as badly as all that, do you?"

Jock\'s hand came down with a thwack on the papers before him.

"Want it! You just bet I want it."

"Do I know her?" asked Emma McChesney quietly.

Jock stopped short in his excited pacing up and down the room.

"Do you know—Why, I didn\'t say there—What makes you think that—?"

"When a youngster like you, whose greatest worry has been whether Harvard\'ll hold \'em again this year, with Baxter out, begins to howl about not being appreciated in business, and to wear a late fall line of wrinkles where he has been smooth before, I feel justified in saying, \'Do I know her?\'"

"Well, it isn\'t any one—at least, it isn\'t what you mean you think it is when you say you—"

"Careful there! You\'ll trip. Never you mind what I mean I think it is when I say. Count ten, and then just tell me what you think you mean."

Jock passed his hand over his head again with that nervous little gesture. Then he sat down, a little wearily. He stared moodily down at the pile of papers before him: His mother faced him quietly across the table.

"Grace Galt\'s getting twice as much as I am," Jock broke out, with savage suddenness. "The first year I didn\'t mind. A fellow gets accustomed, these days, to see women breaking into all the professions and getting away with men-size salaries. But her pay check doubles mine—more than doubles it."

"It\'s been my experience," observed Emma McChesney, "that when a firm condescends to pay a woman twice as much as a man, that means she\'s worth six times as much."

A painful red crept into Jock\'s face. "Maybe. Two years ago that would have sounded reasonable to me. Two years ago, when I walked down Broadway at night, a fifty-foot electric sign at Forty-second was just an electric sign to me. Just part of the town\'s decoration like the chorus girls, and the midnight theater crowds. Now—well, now every blink of every red and yellow globe is crammed full of meaning. I know the power that advertising has; how it influences our manners, and our morals, and our minds, and our health. It regulates the food we eat, and the clothes we wear, and the books we read, and the entertainment we seek. It\'s colossal, that\'s what it is! It\'s—"

"Keep on like that for another two years, sonny, and no business banquet will be complete without you. The next thing you know you\'ll be addressing the Y.M.C.A. advertising classes on The Young Man in Business."

Jock laughed a rueful little laugh. "I didn\'t mean to make a speech. I was just trying to say that I\'ve served my apprenticeship. It hurts a fellow\'s pride. You can\'t hold your head up before a girl when you know her salary\'s twice yours, and you know that she knows it. Why look at Mrs. Hoffman, who\'s with the Dowd Agency. Of course she\'s a wonder, even if her face does look like the fifty-eighth variety. She can write copy that lifts a campaign right out of the humdrum class, and makes it luminous. Her husband works in a bank somewhere. He earns about as much as Mrs. Hoffman pays the least of her department subordinates. And he\'s so subdued that he side-steps when he walks, and they call him the human jelly-fish."

Emma McChesney was regarding her son with a little puzzled frown. Suddenly she reached out and tapped the topmost of the scribbled sheets strewn the length of Jock\'s side of the table.

"What\'s all this?"

Jock tipped back his chair and surveyed the clutter before him.

"That," said he, "is what is known on the stage as \'the papers.\' And it\'s the real plot of this piece."

"M-m-m—I thought so. Just favor me with a scenario, will you?"

Half-grinning, half-serious, Jock stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and began.

"Scene: Offices of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company. Time, the present. Characters: Jock McChesney, handsome, daring, brilliant—"

"Suppose you—er—skip the characters, however fascinating, and get to the action."

Jock McChesney brought the tipped chair down on all-fours with a thud, and stood up. The grin was gone. He was as serious as he had been in the midst of his tirade of five minutes before.

"All right. Here it is. And don\'t blame me if it sounds like cheap melodrama. This stuff," and he waved a hand toward the paper-laden table, "is an advertising campaign plan for the Griebler Gum Company, of St. Louis. Oh, don\'t look impressed. The office hasn\'t handed me any such commission. I just got the idea like a flash, and I\'ve been working it out for the last two weeks. It worked itself out, almost—the way a really scorching idea does, sometimes. This Griebler has been advertising for years. You know the Griebler gum. But it hasn\'t been the right sort of advertising. Old Griebler, the original gum man, had fogy notions about advertising, and as long as he lived they had to keep it down. He died a few months ago—you must have read of it. Left a regular mint. Ben Griebler, the oldest son, started right in to clean out the cobwebs. Of course the advertising end of it has come in for its share of the soap and water. He wants to make a clean sweep of it. Every advertising firm in the country has been angling for the contract. It\'s going to be a real one. Two-thirds of the crowd have submitted plans. And that\'s just where my kick comes in. The Berg, Shriner Company makes it a rule never to submit advance plans."

"Excuse me if I seem a trifle rude," interrupted Mrs. McChesney, "but I\'d like to know where you think you\'ve been wronged in this."

"Right here!" replied Jock, and he slapped his pocket, "and here," he pointed to his head. "Two spots so vital that they make old Achilles\'s heel seem armor-plated. Ben Griebler is one of the show-me kind. He wants value received for money expended, and while everybody knows that he has a loving eye on the Berg, Shriner crowd, he won\'t sign a thing until he knows what he\'s getting. A firm\'s record, standing, staff, equipment, mean nothing to him."

"But, Jock, I still don\'t see—"

Jock gathered up a sheaf of loose papers and brandished them in the air. "This is where I come in. I\'ve got a plan here that will fetch this Griebler person. Oh, I\'m not dreaming. I outlined it for Sam Hupp, and he was crazy about it. Sam Hupp had some sort of plan outlined himself. But he said this made his sound as dry as cigars in Denver. And you know yourself that Sam Hupp\'s copy is so brilliant that he could sell brewery advertising to a temperance magazine."

Emma McChesney stood up. She looked a little impatient, and a trifle puzzled. "But why all this talk! I don\'t get you. Take your plan to Mr. Berg. If it\'s what you think it is he\'ll see it quicker than any other human being, and he\'ll probably fall on your neck and invest you in royal robes and give you a mahogany desk all your own."

"Oh, what\'s the good!" retorted Jock disgustedly. "This Griebler has an appointment at the office to-morrow. He\'ll be closeted with the Old Man. They\'ll call in Hupp. But never a plan will they reveal. It\'s against their code of ethics. Ethics! I\'m sick of the word. I suppose you\'d say I\'m lucky to be associated with a firm like that, and I suppose I am. But I wish in the name of all the gods of Business that they weren\'t so bloomin\' conservative. Ethics! They\'re all balled up in \'em, like Henry James in his style."

Emma McChesney came over from her side of the table and stood very close to her son. She laid one hand very lightly on his arm and looked up into the sullen, angry young face.
\'She laid one hand very lightly on his arm and looked up into the sullen, angry young face\'

"I\'ve seen older men than you are, Jock, and better men, and bigger men, wearing that same look, and for the same reason. Every ambitious man or woman in business wears it at one time or another. Sooner or later, Jock, you\'ll have your chance at the money end of this game. If you don\'t care about the thing you call ethics, it\'ll be sooner. If you do care, it will be later. It rests with you, but it\'s bound to come, because you\'ve got the stuff in you."

"Maybe," replied Jock the cynical. But his face lost some of its sullenness as he looked down at that earnest, vivid countenance up-turned to his. "Maybe. It sounds all right, Mother—in the story books. But I\'m not quite solid on it. These days it isn\'t so much what you\'ve got in you that counts as what you can bring out. I know the young man\'s slogan used to be \'Work and Wait,\' or something pretty like that. But these days they\'ve boiled it down to one word—\'Produce\'!"

"The marvel of it is that there aren\'t more of \'em," observed Emma McChesney sadly.

"More what?"

"More lines. Here,"—she touched his forehead,—"and here,"—she touched his eyes.

"Lines!" Jock swung to face a mirror. "Good! I\'m so infernally young-looking that no one takes me seriously. It\'s darned hard trying to convince people you\'re a captain of finance when you look like an errand boy."

From the center of the room Mrs. McChesney watched the boy as he surveyed himself in the glass. And as she gazed there came a frightened look into her eyes. It was gone in a minute, and in its place came a curious little gleam, half amused, half pugnacious.

"Jock McChesney, if I thought that you meant half of what you\'ve said to-night about honor, and ethics, and all that, I\'d—"

"Spank me, I suppose," said the young six-footer.

"No," and all the humor had fled, "I—Jock, I\'ve never said much to you about your father. But I think you know that he was what he was to the day of his death. You were just about eight when I made up my mind that life with him was impossible. I said then—and you were all I had, son—that I\'d rather see you dead than to have you turn out to be a son of your father. Don\'t make me remember that wish, Jock."

Two quick steps and his arms were about her. His face was all contrition. "Why—Mother! I didn\'t mean—You see this is business, and I\'m crazy to make good, and it\'s such a fight—"

"Don\'t I know it?" demanded Emma McChesney. "I guess your mother hasn\'t been sitting home embroidering lunchcloths these last fifteen years." She lifted her head from the boy\'s shoulder. "And now, son, considering me, not as your doting mother, but in my business capacity as secretary of the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, suppose you reveal to me the inner workings of this plan of yours. I\'d like to know if you really are the advertising wizard that you think you are."

So it was that long after Annie\'s dinner dishes had ceased to clatter in the kitchen; long after she had put her head in at the door to ask, "Aigs \'r cakes for breakfast?" long after those two busy brains should have rested in sleep, the two sat at either side of the light-flooded table, the face of one glowing as he talked, the face of the other sparkling as she listened. And at midnight:

"Why, you infant wonder!" exclaimed Emma McChesney.

At nine o\'clock next morning when Jock McChesney entered the offices of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company he carried a flat, compact bundle of papers under his arm encased in protecting covers of pasteboard, and further secured by bands of elastic. This he carried to his desk, deposited in a drawer, and locked the drawer.

By eleven o\'clock the things which he had predicted the night before had come to pass. A plump little man, with a fussy manner and Western clothes had been ushered into Bartholomew Berg\'s private office. Instinct told him that this was Griebler. Jock left his desk and strolled up to get the switchboard operator\'s confirmation of his guess. Half an hour later Sam Hupp hustled by and disappeared into the Old Man\'s sanctum.

Jock fingered the upper left-hand drawer of his desk. The maddening blankness of that closed door! If only he could find some excuse for walking into that room—any old excuse, no matter how wild!—just to get a chance at it—

His telephone rang. He picked up the receiver, his eye on the closed door, his thoughts inside that room.

"Mr. Berg wants to see you right away," came the voice of the switchboard operator.

Something seemed to give way inside—something in the region of his brain—no, his heart—no, his lungs—

"Well, can you beat that!" said Jock McChesney aloud, in a kind of trance of joy. "Can—you—beat—that!"

Then he buttoned the lower button of his coat, shrugged his sho............