Ray Cummings

“ The president indicated Mr. Merkle and Jimmy.
“Mr. Hope,” he went on, when they were alone, “for some years you have been my secretary. I have had no cause to criticize your work unduly, nor do I think I have treated you unfairly as an employer.
“What has just transpired needs no additional words between us. It is entirely self-evident. Explanations are futile, recriminations idle. As you know, Mr. Hope, integrity of character is one thing this company demands above all else. For a person without it there can be no place in this organization. ”

“ The factory was built; the coal, lying there all these years idle underneath his mother’s farm, was burning, and yielding up its precious heat for the great furnaces. And he—Jimmy Rand, once only a mule-boy and miner in the Fallon Brothers mine—had done it all! ”

“ Mr. Wentworth turned again to his secretary. Mr. Hope had paled visibly.
“Half an hour after you dismissed Mr. Rand you repeated his conversation to me, Mr. Hope. It is my remembrance that it concerned a natural-gas strike in Alberta, near property held by this young man’s mother. Is that correct?” ”