your son held him for a while, then Sam got too strong for us." Lowry knew of Lida's defection but he avoided reference to it. "Slengels figure that this shakes us and they can finish us. They're pointing for Alban now.
"They'll attract some of our little accounts," continued Lowry. "A few little fellows always trail a big one from the house losing him to the house getting him. There's always a bandwagon bunch. Slengels will mop up some of those; but they're after the big one—Alban. They're saying on the street: when they get Alban, they'll put us out."
Mr. Rountree's firmly set lips made no reply or comment but Jay asked: "Is that the way they say it, 'when they get Alban?' They say 'when'?"
Lowry looked at Jay steadily. "'When,'" he repeated, "was the exact word they used."
Jay followed Ellen into her little room for the ostensible purpose of applying himself to the files; but he did nothing with them. He was feeling fight with an intensity and to a degree strange to him. Previously, when he had thought of "fight," it had meant the sensation aroused in him when he had rowed himself out in a losing boat on the Thames and when, once in a tournament final, he had come to the "turn" four down on a champion and had fought on to win on the last green.
Such sensations suddenly had become childish compared to this. They had supplied him with a simple, almost immediate satisfaction in terms of physical exhaustion or of triumph; this taunted and goaded him, it whipped him up and exasperated him and offered him no ready means of satisfaction at all.
