Читать книгу The Ball of Fire онлайн

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“Oh, I see,” grinned Jim Sargent. “You want to do something you can really call a job. If I remember rightly, you started with an equipment of four horse cars and two miles of rusted rail. What do you want to conquer next?”

Allison glanced down the hill, then back out across the starlit sky. Some new fervor had possessed him to-night which made him a poet, and loosened the tongue which, previous to this, could almost calculate its utterances in percentage.

“The world,” he said.

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Edward E. Allison walked into the offices of the Municipal Transportation Company at nine o’clock, and set his basket of opened and carefully annotated letters out of the mathematical centre of his desk; then he touched a button, and a thin young man, whose brow, at twenty, wore the traces of preternatural age, walked briskly in.

“Has Mr. Greggory arrived?”

The intensely earnest young man glanced at the clock.

“Yes, sir,” he replied.

“Take him these letters, and ask him if he will be kind enough to step here.”