Would you believe it? He don't know any more about what's in the air than a museum mummy knows of Lobster Square. This little private cyclone that's been turnin' the office upside down ain't so much as ruffled his whiskers. Checks are checks to him, and these special trouble makers don't give him any chills up the back at all. He's been told, though, to use the acid bottle on his books and write in a new version. "Well, why not do it?" says I. "What's that to you?" "Why, don't you see," says he, "it would be making a false entry, and--I--I----Well, I've never done such a thing in my life, Torchy, and I can't begin now." And, say, what do you know about that, eh? Just a piece of phony bookkeepin' that he don't even have to put his name to, his job gone if he don't follow orders, and him almost to the age limit anyway, with Son in Law Bennett ready to shove him on the street the minute he gets the sack! "Do you mean it?" says I. He puts his signature to the resignation and hands it over for me to read. "Say, Dudley," says I, lookin' him up and down, "this listens to me like a bughouse play of yours; but I got to admit that you do it sporty. There's no ocher streak in you." "I hoped you would understand," says he. "In the circumstances, it was all I could do, you see." "What I see plainer'n anything else," says I, "is that if this goes through your career is bugged to the limit. When do you want this handed in?" "As soon as possible," says he. "I suppose I ought to resign at once." "Resign!" says I. "You'll be lucky if the old man don't have you chucked through the window. Better be waitin' down in the lower corridor when I spring this on Mr. Ellins." Nothin' of that kind for Uncle Dudley, though. He starts straightenin' up his desk as I goes out, as calm as though he was house cleanin' for a vacation. And while I'm tryin' to make up my mind how to deliver this document to the main stem and duck an ambulance ride afterwards, the directors' meetin' breaks up. So I finds Old Hickory alone in his private office and slips it casual on the pad in front of him. "Here, what's this?" he snorts, callin' me back as he opens up the sheet. "Eh? Dudley! Resigns, does he! What, that dried up, goat faced, custard brained, old----Say, boy; ask him what the grizzly grindstones he means by----" "I did," says I, "and, if you want to know, he's quittin' because he's too straight to cook up the books the way you told him." "Cook up the books!" gasps Old Hickory, gettin' raspb'ry tinted in the face and displayin' neck veins like a truck horse. "He's been welshing, has he? Perhaps he'd like to turn State's witness? Well, by the great sizzling skyrockets, if that's his trick, I'll give him enough of----"