"Do you get the job!" yells friend manager, slappin' him on the back. "No, you don't get it--only if you leave here without signing your name to a five-year contract and accepting a check for fifteen hundred dollars' commission and as much more as you want to draw on your expense account, I'll--I'll--murder you! But first, you lunch with me at the Fitz-Barlton and we'll map out a campaign--" "Gimme that eight hundred!" says Alex to me. I passed it over still semi-conscious. Alex stretches his arms, puts the money away and grins. "Get me that Eve girl on the phone, will you?" he tells me. "I--I had a little bet with her, too!" He lights the cigar Buck Rice had give him in the mornin', blows out some smoke and looks over at Broadway, jammed with the matinee crowd. "Some burg!" he says, shakin' his head and grinnin' at me! CHAPTER II THE SELF-COMMENCER There's nothin' the world loves so much as a good tryer. I don't mean the birds that havin' everything in their favor, includin' a ten-mile start, finishes first in the Big Race--I'm talkin' about the guys that never get better than second or third, but generally land in the money. The old Consistent Charlies that, no matter how many times they're beaten, figures the time to quit is when you're dead and buried! Did you ever stop to think that the tryers which never get nowhere is responsible for the other guys' success? They're the babies that make a race or a fight out of it, and if it wasn't for them dubs there'd be no successes at all. In order to have winners, we got to have _losers_, don't we? And don't forget that yesterday's losers are to-morrow's winners and vice-president or vice versa, whatever it is. A fighter knows that these birds which come up smilin' no matter how many times he drops 'em for the count is as dangerous as dynamite, until he knocks 'em cold. No matter how bad this loser may be battered up, he's always got a chance while he's tryin'. I've seen guys that was winnin' by two miles curl up and quit before a dub they had beaten till the crowd was yellin' for mercy, simply because this poor bunged-up simp kept comin' in all the time--battered, bloody, drunk with wallops--_but tryin' up to the last bell_! Now these guys may never get nowhere, but they're the birds that's put most of the guys that _do_ where they are. Why? Think it over! You gotta be _good_ to beat them birds, don't you? They make competition keen, they keep the other guys on their toes, they're the gasoline that keeps the old world goin' forward on high and the birds that get over are only the chauffeurs. You gotta have both to run the car and the universe wouldn't move forward six inches if we didn't have one failure for every success.