I will have approximately one hundred operations tied to me, covering every phase of manufacturing, real estate, wholesaling, retailing, distribution and finance in the area. I'll trade with myself, supply myself, transport myself and finance myself and anybody who tries to move in will never know what hit him. It will be positively pathetic if anybody tries to compete with Artie Chesbro. The car crept slowly along the littered road toward River Street. His thinking had never been so clear and lightning-fast--and his heart had never thudded so alarmingly. The benzedrine, he supposed. Well, you use things for what they're worth and take the incidental consequences like a man. A big man. First the valley area, perhaps a year to consolidate it. Then move down- and upriver, slowly at first. But he knew the pace always accelerated. The bigger you get the faster you grow. Rockefeller, Morgan, Zeckendorf, Odlum--they all had started somewhere. This was his somewhere. Artie Chesbro considered quietly that he'd be running the state by 1959. If there was a war, knock a year off the timetable. Wars were good business for a good businessman. And, he thought quietly, with the clarity of benzedrine, they pruned the human tree. * * * * * An eighteen-year-old sprig of the human tree, Luther G. Bayswater, was walking slowly down River Street with a feeling of intense unreality enveloping him. It seemed frightfully queer that he should have a helmet on his head, heavy boots with two-buckle flaps on his feet and around his waist a full cartridge belt with a first-aid kit, a bayonet and a canteen hitched to it. Queerest of all was the rifle slung on his right shoulder, whose sling he held in the fork between thumb and fore-finger like a hick eternally about to snap his gallus. Luther was a private in the National Guard because his mother had a confused notion that this would keep him from overseas service, ever. Somebody had told her so. She missed her little boy, she said, when he was away on summer training and she didn't like the idea of him going through the dark streets--so late, and in strange neighborhoods!--for his armory sessions, but she comfortably reported that it was all worthwhile for her to have her peace of mind about Luther not having to go overseas. His mother was at that moment in bed with a high fever induced by the phone call from the company clerk that had mobilized Luther. His mission--unreal!--as given him by the hardware merchant who was his platoon leader was to cover two blocks of River Street like a cop on a beat.