"Duck again! You're doing fine! I ain't made my living selling men papers for this long not to know the big boys _some_, and more. Each man is different, but you can cod him, or bluff him, or scare him, or let down the floodgates; some way you can put it over if you take each one separate, and hit him where he lives. See? Finding his dwelling place is the trouble." "Mickey, I do see," cried Douglas. "What you tell me will be invaluable to me. You know I am from another land so I have personal ways of thinking and the men I'm accustomed to are different. What I have been centring on is myself, and what I can do." "Won't work here! What you got to get a bead on here is the _other fellow_, and how to _do_ him. See?" "Take these books and fly," said Douglas. "I've spent one of the most profitable hours of my life, but concretely it is an hour, and we're going to the Country Club to-night and may stay as long as we choose and we're going to have a grand time. You like going to the country, don't you?" "Ain't words for telling," said Mickey, gathering his armload of books and racing down the hall. When the day's work was finished, with a load of books to deliver before an office closed, they started on the run to the club house. Bruce waited in the car while Mickey sped in with the books, and returning, to save opening the door and crossing before the man he was fast beginning to idolize, Mickey took one of his swift cuts across the back end of the car. While his hand was outstretched and his foot uplifted to enter, from a high-piled passing truck toppled a box, not a big box, but large enough to knock Mickey senseless and breathless when it struck him between the shoulders. Douglas had Mickey in the car with orders for the nearest hospital, toward which they were hurrying, when the boy opened his eyes and sat up. He looked inquiringly at Douglas, across whose knees he had found himself. "Wha--what happened?" he questioned with his first good indrawing of recovered breath. "A box fell from a truck loaded past reason and almost knocked the life out of you!" cried Douglas. "'Knocked the life out of me?'" repeated Mickey. "You've been senseless for three blocks, Mickey." A slow horror spread over Mickey's face. "Wha--what was you going to do?" he wavered. "Running for a hospital," said Douglas. "S'pose my head had been busted, and I'd been stretched on the glass table and maybe laid up for days or knocked out altogether?" demanded Mickey. "You'd have had the best surgeon in Multiopolis, and every care, Mickey," assured Douglas. "Ugh!" Mickey collapsed utterly. "Must be hurt worse than I thought," was Douglas' mental comment. "He couldn't be a coward!"