He paused for a moment, stretched his legs out straight before him and put his hands into his pockets. “If I really told you all you ought to know, to understand the background and setting of the story, I’d be sitting here to-morrow morning still talking. So I won’t try, I’ll just tell you the plain story as it happened. You try to imagine the background: an organization as big, as complicated, with as many chances for waste motion, or overorganization, or poor organization as society itself. And not only power and glory, but _cash_, plenty of hard cash as immediate reward for the successful use of brains. “Well now, into that arrives a smart youngster full of enthusiasm for making things run better, just like your friends to-night; dead sure just like them that _he_ has the key; with lots of pep and brains and interest in his job, pushing his way right up from the stenographer’s desk, with his eye on the Manager’s. Do you get him? Well, he’s laid awake nights, thinking how to improve the organization, partly because he wanted to improve it, partly because he wanted to get the credit for it ... just like your friends again. And because he is a smart young fellow as keen as a razor, he soon figured out a way to increase business, to increase it like a house afire, and to handle it once it was increased. “He went to the big man of the concern and laid out his plans. Now, you’d better believe the big men in any organization always have a glad hand out for anybody in the concern who’ll show interest and brains; and the boy got treated like a king. Sure, he could try out his plan! On a small scale at first, to see how it would work. Let him take a county out of each of six selected states, and concentrate on them. And, sure, yes, indeed, he could have anything in the organization he wanted, to make his try with.