Edison Marshall

“ I've surrounded you with luxury instead of hardship. You've never done an honest day's toil on earth. You don't know what it is to sweat, to be so tired you can't stand, to wonder where the next meal is coming from, to know what a hard and bitter thing life is! ”

“ Ned, I wonder if you like excitement.”
“Do I? You know how I love polo——”
“You love to watch! The point is, do you like excitement well enough to take a slight risk of your life for it? Do you care enough about success, on your own hook, to go through snow and ice to win it? A chance came to-day to make from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars for this firm; all it takes is a little nerve, a little endurance of hardship, a little love of adventure. I hoped to interest you in it—by so doing to get you started along the way that leads to manhood and self-respect. ”

“ Ned, your mother and I have always loved you too well. I suppose it is one of the curses of this age—that ease and softness have made us a hysterical, sentimental people, and we love our children not wisely, but too well. ”

“ I've let you grow to man's years—twenty-nine, I believe—and still be a child in experience. The work you do around my business could be done by a seventeen-year-old boy. You don't know what it means to keep a business day. You come when you like and go when you like. In your folly you are no longer careful of the rights of other, better people—or you wouldn't have driven as you did to-day. You can no longer be bright and attractive at dinner except under the stimulation of cocktails—nothing really vicious yet, but pointing to the way things are going. Ned, I want to make a man of you. ”

“ For all the luxury with which he had surrounded his wife and son, he himself had always lived frugally: simple food, sufficient exercise, the most personal and detailed contact with his great business. He had fought upward from utter poverty to the presidency and ownership of one of the greatest fur houses of his country, partly through the exercise of the principle of absolute business integrity, mostly through the sheer dynamic force of the man. His competitors knew him as a fair but remorseless fighter ”

“ I've got strength to meet it. My spirit will not be buffeted willy-nilly in those winds that blow between the worlds. I am a man, I've done man's work, and I can hold my place with other men in the great trials to come. ”

“ Let me say, though, Ned—whatever her lot, no matter how menial her toil, your life could be spared much easier than hers. It would be better that you should be snuffed out than that she should lose one of her working hands. Likely you felt superior to her as you drove her home; in reality you were in finitely inferior. She has gone much farther than you have. She knows more of life; she is harder and better and truer and worth more to this dark world in which we live. The world could ill afford to lose her, a fighter, a worker. ”

“ To-day I met Leo Schaffner at lunch, and in our talk he gave me what I consider a real business inspiration. He tells me, in his various jobbing houses, he has several thousand silk and velvet gowns and coats and wraps left on his hands in the financial depression that immediately followed the war. He was cussing his luck because he didn't know what to do with them. Of course they were part of the surplus that helped glut the markets when hard times made people stop buying—stock that was manufactured during the booming days of the war. ”

“ Bearded trappers, running their lines through the desolate wastes of the North, were used to seeing him come venturing up their gray rivers in the spring, fur-clad and wind-tanned,—finding his relaxation and keeping fit by personally attending to the buying of some of his furs. Thus it was hard for a soft man to feel easy in his presence. ”

“ The cargo of furs you should bring out should be worth close to a hundred thousand. Expenses won't be fifteen thousand in all. It would mean work; dealing with a bunch of crafty redskins isn't play for boys! Maybe there'd be cold and rough weather, for Bering Sea deserves no man's trust. But it would be the finest sport in the world, an opportunity to take Alaskan bear and tundra caribou—plenty of adventure and excitement and tremendous profits to boot. It would be a man's job, Ned—but you'd get a kick out of it you never got out of a booze party in your life. ”

“ The Skopin Islands are charted—any that are inhabited at all—easy to find, easy to get to with a seaworthy launch. Every one of those Indians you'll find there will buy a dress for his squaw or his daughter to show off in, during the summer, and pay for it with a fine piece of fur. For some of the brighter, richer gowns I haven't any doubt but that you could get blue and silver fox. As I say, the worst of 'em is worth at least a single marten. ”

“ Hit as far north as you want—the farther you go the better you will do—and then work south. Making a big chain that cuts off the currents and the tides, the Skopin group is surrounded by an unbroken ice sheet in midwinter, so you have to count on rounding the Aleutian Peninsula into Pacific waters some time in November. If you wait much longer you're apt not to get out before spring. ”

“ Considering your lack of space, I'd limit you to marten, blue and silver fox, fisher and mink, and perhaps such other freak furs as would bring a high price—no white fox or muskrat or beaver, perhaps not even ermine and land otter. Ply along from island to island, starting north and working south and west clear out among the Aleuts, to keep out of the way of the winter, showing your dresses at the Indian villages and trading them for furs! ”

“ His son leaned back, keenly interested for the first time. “Good Lord, why? You can't go into business selling out-of-date women's clothes!”
“Can't, eh? Son, while he was talking to me, it occurred to me all at once that the least of those gowns, the poorest one in the lot, was worth at least a marten skin! Think of it! A marten skin, from Northern Canada and Alaska, returned the trapper around sixty dollars in 1920. Now let me get down to brass tacks.
“It's true I don't intend to sell any of those hairy old white trappers any women's silk gowns. ”

“ In the end, nothing can stand against it. If it dies in this land, Lord help us—because we will be unable to help ourselves. We can then no longer drive the heathen from our walls. With it, we are great—without it we are a race of weaklings. ”

“ Through their hot, long summer days they wear dresses like American women, and the gayer and prettier the dresses, the better they like 'em. To my knowledge, no one has ever fed them silk—simply because silk was too high—but being women, red or white, they'd simply go crazy over it.
“The other factor in the combination is that the Intrepid, due to the unsettled fur market, failed to do any extensive buying on her last annual trading trip through the islands, and as a result practically all the Indians have their full catch on hand. ”