Page:Man's Country (1923).pdf/126

 "So ordered."

George lifted a beckoning hand. Percy Mock, peering through the glass wall and waiting for just that signal, stepped in and laid a package of pink checks before the Secretary-Treasurer, who instantly took them up and feathered their edges lovingly through his fingers. It was a great moment for young George Judson. In these checks he held the final irrefutable evidence that he was not an idle dreamer of dreams but a real doer of deeds. As if lost in thought, forgetful of an audience, he lovingly caressed those perforated edges once more, gloating a little; and it was impossible that the staid business men whose eyes were upon him so intently did not comprehend something of what was passing in the younger man's mind, and sympathize with it.

But before the silence could become more than just noticeable George had recovered himself and began to pass out the checks; to Milton Morris a check for eighty thousand odd, to himself a check for forty thousand odd—money that was now his, not the company's but his own, earned by his own energy, the product of his own investment of money and labor. He hesitated before it, color coming and going in his cheeks, his eyes arrested and clinging to the check almost as Mr. Peattie's adhesive optic might have clung. It was the concrete evidence