The Fighting Chance

Plank laughed, and looked over several sheets of the typewritten matter on the desk beside him.

"Suppose I meet Quarrier?" he said.

"All right. Did he suggest a date?"

"At four, this afternoon."

"Do you think you had better go?"

"I think it might do no harm," said Plank.

"Amen!" observed Siward, laughing, and touched the electric button for the early tea, which Plank adored at any hour.

For a while they dropped business and discussed their tea, chatting very comfortably together. Long ago Siward had found out something of the mental breadth of the man beside him, and that he was worth listening to as well as talking to. For Plank had formed opinions upon a great many subjects; and whatever culture he possessed was from sheer desire for self-cultivation.

"You know, Siward," he was accustomed to say with a smile, "you inherit what I am qualifying myself to transmit."

"It will be all one in a thousand years," was Siward's usual rejoinder.

"That is not going to prevent my efforts to become a good ancestor to my descendants," Plank would say laughingly. "They shall have a chance, every one of them. And it will be up to them if they don't make good."

Sipping their tea in the pleasant, sunny room, they discussed matters of common interest--Plank's recent fishing trip on Long Island and the degeneracy of liver-fed trout; the North Side Club's Experiments with European partridges; Billy Fleetwood's new stables; forestry, and the chance of national legislation concerning it--a subject of which Plank was very fond, and on which he had exceedingly sound ideas.

Drifting from one topic to another through the haze of their cigars, silent when it pleased them to be so, there could be no doubt of their liking for each other upon a basis at least superficially informal; and if Plank's manner retained at times a shade of quaint reserve, Siward's was perhaps the more frankly direct for that reason.

"I think," observed Plank, laying his half-consumed cigar on the silver tray, "that I'd better go down town and see what our pre-glacial friend Quarrier wants. I may be able to furnish him with a new sensation."

"I wonder if Quarrier ever experienced a genuine sensation," mused Siward, arranging the papers before him into divisional piles.

"Plenty," said Plank drily.

"I don't think so."

"Plenty," repeated Plank. "It's your thin-lipped, thin-nosed, pasty-pale, symmetrical brother who is closer to the animal under his mask than any of us imagine. I--" He hesitated. "Do you want to know my opinion of Quarrier? I've never told you. I don't usually talk about my--dislikes. Do you want to know?"