Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/43

 for "handling people" was the secret of all his achievements. He was a great manipulator of the plastic souls of men. Drivers, he could hire in job lots: but leaders!. . . why, if this Henry Harrington now were a genius at kneading and molding the human will? . . . Old Two Blades gaped and stared.

"The best I ever saw at handling a jury," affirmed Judge Allen with conviction. "He has dished Scanlon a couple of times."

Scanlon was the head of the legal department for Boland General.

"Um! Yes," remembered Old Two Blades; "I think Scanlon has mentioned him to me—thought we had better find something for him to do maybe." The caverned eyes began to be set covetously upon the receding figure of this young man.

"Why," ejaculated Mr. Boland suddenly, "if he has all this peculiar kind of ability, and since he's not identified very much with anything in particular, why, he might be the very man to" The eager utterance suspended itself as abruptly as if Old Two Blades had bitten his tongue.

"Yes—yes?" Judge Allen bent his impressive snowwhite head low to receive the confidence; but he never got it. The Boland lips had tightened and the Boland mind went off into executive session with itself on a project so important that he had never yet discussed it with a single soul—one of the largest projects his mind, accustomed to great visions, had ever contemplated.

Within a few minutes he turned from Judge Allen and beckoned Scanlon to him—Scanlon, huge, fat and competent, who like the rest of the cabinet of Boland