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Pausing only to wire Fles to unload as much stock as he could for even if this were only a temporary scare it would undoubtedly affect the market I finally drove to the Intelligencer. Knowing Le ffaçasé I hardly expected to be received with either cordiality or politeness, but I was not quite prepared for the actual salute.

About this time it became indisputable that Button Gwynnet Fles was no longer of value to Consolidated Pemmican. His Yankee shrewdness and caution which enabled him to run the corporation when it was merely a name and a quotation on the stockmarket had the limits of its virtues. He was extraordinarily provincial in outlook and quite unable to see the concern on a world scale.

The whole concern, until my stock purchase, had been the chattel and creature of one Button Gwynnet Fles. In appearance he was such a genuine Yankee, lean and sharp, with a slight stoop and prying eyes, that one quite expected a straw to protrude from between his thin lips or have him draw from his pocket a wooden nutmeg and offer it for sale.

Instead of one mass there were countless ones; at the whim of a chance wind or bird, seeds might alight in an area apparently safe and overwhelm a community miles away from the living glacier. No place was out of range of the attack; no square foot of land kept any value. The stockmarket crashed, and I congratulated myself on having sent Fles orders to sell.

I saw no future in staying with this sinking ship and eager to be back at the center of things Fles wrote me that the large stock of pemmican which had been accumulating without buyers could now be very profitably disposed of I severed my connection for the second time with the Intelligencer and returned to my proper sphere.

After the experience of Gootes and myself, parachute landings had been ruled out as too hazardous, but someone happily thought of the use of snowshoes and it was on these clumsy means that tourists, at a high cost and at less than snail's pace, tramped wonderingly over the tamed menace. My thought then, as I explained to Fles, was to reactivate the factory and sell my product to the sightseers.

Besides, in General Thario I had a much abler assistant and so, perhaps reluctantly because of my oversensitivity, I displaced Fles and making the general president of the corporation I accepted the post of chairman of the board. I must say he took a perfectly natural business move with unbecoming illgrace.

However, he seemed very friendly and affable toward me personally once the chill air of the waitingroom had been left behind and as Button Fles had advised me insistently to entertain without regard to expense any officials with whom I came in contact, I thought it politic to invite him to dinner.

If anything the spirit of the country, despite the great setback, was better after the dropping of the bomb than before. I was so fascinated by the entire episode that I stayed by my radio practically all my waking hours, much to the distress of Button Fles. Every report, every scrap of news interested me.