Booth Tarkington

“ Young Akers told Fred that this George Minafer had worked like a houn’-dog ever since he got started out at the works. They have a special plant for nitroglycerin, way off from the main plant, o’ course—in the woods somewhere—and George Minafer’s been working there, and lately they put him in charge of it. He oversees shooting oil-wells, too, and shoots ’em himself, sometimes. They aren’t allowed to carry it on the railroads, you know—have to team it. Young Akers says George rides around over the bumpy roads, sitting on as much as three hundred quarts of nitroglycerin! ”

“ Fred told me that they’re living in some apartment house, and said Georgie supports her. He was going to study law, but couldn’t earn enough that way to take care of Fanny, so he gave it up. Fred’s wife told him all this. Says Fanny doesn’t do anything but play bridge these days. Got to playing too high for awhile and lost more than she wanted to tell Georgie about, and borrowed a little from old Frank Bronson. Paid him back, though. Don’t know how Fred’s wife heard it. Women do hear the darndest things!”
“They do,” Eugene agreed. ”

“ If he gets blown sky-high some day he won’t have a bigger drop, when he comes down, than he’s already had! Don’t it beat the devil! Young Akers said he’s got all the nerve there is in the world. Well, he always did have plenty of that—from the time he used to ride around here on his white pony and fight all the Irish boys in Can-Town, with his long curls all handy to be pulled out. ”

“ Well, we’ll probably see his name in the papers some day if he stays with that job!”
... However, the nitroglycerin expert of whom they spoke did not get into the papers as a consequence of being blown up, although his daily life was certainly a continuous exposure to that risk. Destiny has a constant passion for the incongruous, and it was George’s lot to manipulate wholesale quantities of terrific and volatile explosives in safety, and to be laid low by an accident so commonplace and inconsequent that it was a comedy. ”

“ But still, they didn’t elect another chief in his place. Other tribes thought that was curious, and wondered about it a lot, but finally they came to the conclusion that the beech grove people were afraid a new chief might turn out to be a bad Indian, too, and wear iron shoes like Vendonah. ”