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"Not necessarily," replied Whitney; he was talking in the most careless, impersonal way. "A man of your sort, with the strength and the ability you inherit, and with the power that they give you to play an important part in the world, doesn't let things drift to ruin. I intend, ultimately, to give my share of the Ranger-Whitney Company to Tecumseh I'm telling you this in confidence."
"When you've lived a while longer, Arthur," said he, "you'll not be so swift and harsh in your judgments of men who have to lay the far-sighted plans and have to deal with mankind as it is, not as it ought to be. However, by that time the Ranger-Whitney Company will be wiped out. It's a pity.
In six minutes the noon whistle would blow. But the workmen the seven hundred in the Ranger-Whitney flour mills, the two hundred and fifty in the Ranger-Whitney cooperage adjoining were, every man and boy of them, as hard at it as if the dinner rest were hours away.
Thinking over the whole of the Ranger-Whitney relations and the sudden double break in them, he had begun to believe that perhaps Adelaide had had the good luck to make an extremely clever stroke when she shifted from Ross Whitney to Hargrave.
Scarborough, feeling that he had been neglecting his trusteeship, now devoted himself to the Ranger-Whitney Company. He had long consultations with Howells, and studied the daily and weekly balance sheets which Howells sent him. In the second month after the annual meeting he cabled Dory to come home.
Scarborough gave a clear and appalling account of how the Ranger-Whitney Company's prosperity was slipping into the abyss like a caving sand bank, on all sides, apparently under pressure of forces beyond human control. "In view of the facts," said he, in conclusion, "our sole hope is in putting ourselves to one side and giving an entirely new management an entirely free hand."
Think it over, and if any new ideas come to you run up to Chicago and see me." Arthur did indeed think it over, every moment of that afternoon; and before going home he took a long walk alone. He saw that Charles Whitney had proposed a secret partnership, in which he was to play Whitney's game and, in exchange, was to get control of the Ranger-Whitney Company.
In Hiram Ranger's last year the Ranger-Whitney Company made half a million; the first year under the trustees there was a small deficit. Charles Whitney was most apologetic to his fellow trustees who had given him full control because he owned just under half the stock and was the business man of the three. "I've relied wholly on Howells," explained he.
When Charles Whitney heard Arthur was about to be married, he offered him a place on the office staff of the Ranger-Whitney Company at fifteen hundred a year. "It is less than you deserve on your record," he wrote, "but there is no vacancy just now, and you shall go up rapidly.
And every "hand" in those two great factories knew how all-seeing that glance was critical, but just; exacting, but encouraging. All-seeing, in this instance, did not mean merely fault-seeing. Hiram Ranger, manufacturing partner and controlling owner of the Ranger-Whitney Company of St. Christopher and Chicago, went on into the cooperage, leaving energy behind him, rousing it before him.
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