Chapter
10
"RATS DESERT—"FOR A LONG MONTH OGDEN Secor lay at St. Luke's. Surgeons pulled their whiskers, glaring owl-like at the patient the while they wondered why the deuce nature had not come to their rescue. At last she did—to some measure at least—and he was bundled off home, weak and broken.
They advised him to seek change and rest in a long ocean voyage; but he felt that his business, already long neglected, needed him. Not that he longer found the old keen delight in anticipation of strenuous coping with the storms and buffetings of the commercial world, but rather that habit drove him to it.
He found conditions in a frightful muddle. No one seemed to know what had been transpiring in the office—Stickler least of all. Secor did not deem it necessary to question Sammy—it had bee
