DUSKIN by Grace Livingston Hill Page A

man? She had asked a few cautious questions of Frederick Fawcett, and he had said that there were comparatively few men well equipped and trustworthy who were available at present for new jobs. Of course there were new, untried ones, but one didn’t dare put a new man on a big job, and if they were going to broaden out along the lines suggested at the banquet last night, they would need to be looking around for good men and training them in readiness for when the need arose.
    She had not hinted that she might be in immediate need of one, but she had taken the precaution to jot down the name of the one man whom Fawcett mentioned as being the only one he knew at the present time who could be got in a hurry, and he was going up to Maine fishing. Ah! It might be that Maine would have yet to yield up another vacationer before many days!
    She went on reading the letters, searching for the one she remembered. The first one that had come under her observation had complained about the rivets not coming, and the other about the paint being stolen. They had impressed her at the time as being items too trivial for a grown man to whine about. Now as she read the letter over again it did not seem quite so unbusinesslike as she had thought. The sentences were crisp and to the point.
    The rivets we ordered from Cross and Keyes have not arrived. In consequence the work was held up a day or two. We were further delayed by the fact that a quantity of paint, which had been locked in the office, was stolen overnight, and no more of the right quality could be procured short of Chicago. I have put a double watch on the building now and hope to prevent further trouble, but these little holdups have been most unforeseen and unaccountable. We put the matter of the paint into the hands of the police who are trying to trace it, but Cross and Keyes have been unable as yet to get any clue to the lost rivets, which they say they shipped immediately as agreed. Sometimes I feel that there is an enemy at work.
    Of course, that might be a mere amateurish way of making excuses to cover his own delinquencies. A young man who would go up to Chicago for a while—day and night and perhaps two days—at this critical stage of the building game was likely too flighty to realize how inadequate he was to the situation.
    Whatever became of those rivets anyway? There seemed to have been no further mention of them in the correspondence. Was he still sitting around waiting for the rivets to arrive? No wonder Mr. Fawcett was almost in a nervous breakdown over the situation. Why hadn’t he fired that namby-pamby young man long ago? He ought to be writing fairy tales rather than business letters. It needed a man who could
do
things on a job like this. Well, she would see that things began to happen as soon as she got there anyway.
    She looked impatiently out at the landscape. What a pity that she had to waste her time on this stupid stuff instead of having leisure to enjoy the new country through which she was passing. It was too bad. But she must get this case in hand. If only Mr. Fawcett would hurry up and get well and come and take the whole thing out of her hands! If only the speech and the last night’s success could have been the end of her mission, how pleasant it all would have been. Yet, she shrank from even those before she experienced them. Well, she would do the best she could; that was all that could be expected of her. Yet she knew in her heart that her whole interest was for the Fawcett Construction Company and she meant to see it win. She wanted to see those two contemptible crooks beaten—yes and the third young crook who had fallen apparently from the pillar where his friends seemed to think he belonged. She was out to win, and win she would if human effort could make that possible.
    And then she wondered why that phrase sounded familiar just now, and was annoyed when she remembered it had been in one of Duskin’s credentials.
    When Carol finally