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Updated: June 23, 2025
Maybe they'll let you pick out somethin' that suits you better next time." He couldn't get over it, though. Along about lunch time he comes out to me, as solemn as though he's servin' a warrant for homicide, and says that Mr. Robert will attend to my case now. "Piddie," says I, givin' him the partin' grip, "you've been a true friend of mine.
Tell 'em I said you howled around like a pup with a sore ear." Piddie turns white and gives me the glassy eye that's all. I couldn't tease a fire out of him with a box of matches. But that didn't make up for the way he'd roughed Mallory. I was still sore over it at closin' time; so I lays for Mallory and asks him why he didn't risk the job and take a crack at Piddie's jaw. He just laughs.
As long as she kept her work up to the mark, which she does, it wasn't any funeral of mine. I never have yearned to be a volunteer chaperon. But I was kind of sorry for little Miss Joyce. I expect I said something of the kind to Vee, and she was all for having Mr. Piddie give her a good talking to. "No use," says I. "Piddie wouldn't know how.
For the big war gave Hartley his chance, and he grabbed it as eager as a park squirrel nabbin' a peanut. He'd been hangin' on here in the bond room for five or six years, edgin' up step by step until he got to be assistant chief, but at that he wasn't much more'n an office drudge. Everybody ordered him around, from Old Hickory down to Mr. Piddie.
But then, Piddie has been waitin' for the word to fire Brink Hollis ever since this cheerful eyed young hick was wished on the Corrugated through a director's pull nearly a year ago, when he was fresh from college.
Say, it was a puffy lot of hot air she hands out; but I admit that after two or three more speeches like that, and with her promisin' to square anything Piddie might have to say about not comin' back, she had me goin'. "Well, what's the proposition?" says I. "Let's tell him all, so he will understand just what he's to do," suggests Marjorie.
"When I have any further orders," says he, puffin' out his face, "you will get them!" "Oh, slush!" says I. "Don't play so rough, Piddie." I was onto him, all right. I've seen these hot-air plungers before. They follow up a stock for weeks, and buy and sell in six figures, and reckon up how they've hit the market for great chunks but it's all under their lids.
"Eh?" says Old Hickory, starin' at him blank. "Son of yours with us? I'd forgotten. Let's see. Torchy, in what department is young Tyler now?" "Hartley?" says I. "Oh, he quit weeks ago." "Quit?" says Z. K. "Do you mean he was fired?" "A little of both," says I. "Him and Mr. Piddie split about fifty-fifty on that. They had a debate about him gettin' a raise.
He draws down salary for bein' confidential secretary to the G. M.; but Con. Sec. don't half cover it. He keeps the run of everything, from what the last quarterly dividend was down to how many tubs of pins is used by the office force every month. I'd never made good with Piddie in a month of Yom Kippurs if it hadn't been for Old Heavyweight, the main squeeze.
Say, I thought I knew Piddie. If anybody'd asked me to pick a party for the Honest John act from among the crowd we got around the Corrugated Trust here, I'd made J. Hemmingway Piddie my one best bet.
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