The Gasoline Age: The Story of the Men Who Made it

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THE GASOLINE AGE

THE STORY OF THE MEN WHO MADE IT

С. В. GLASSCOCK

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents 5

DEDICATION 6

ACKNOWLEDGMENT 7

ILLUSTRATIONS 9

CHAPTER I — A VISION BECOMES REALITY 10

CHAPTER II — GET A HORSE! 17

CHAPTER III — THE MIDWEST GETS THE BUSINESS 26

CHAPTER IV — FORD DIFFICULTIES 37

CHAPTER V — COMPETENCE TAKES EFFECT 47

CHAPTER VI — PROMOTION PAVES THE WAY 56

CHAPTER VII — INTO THE BIG MONEY 63

CHAPTER VIII — MEN MAKE THE MACHINE 70

CHAPTER IX — FORD SPEEDS UP FROM SLOW START 78

CHAPTER X — AN INDUSTRIAL COMET STARTS ON ITS COURSE 86

CHAPTER XI — TO THE JUNK YARD, AND TO FAME 92

CHAPTER XII — A SALESMAN SHOWS HIS WARES 100

CHAPTER XIII — A BUILDER FROM THE GROUND UP 104

CHAPTER XIV — HIGH FINANCE TAKES CONTROL 110

CHAPTER XV — BODY BY FISHER 121

CHAPTER XVI — MANPOWER 129

CHAPTER XVII — ARISTOCRATS OF INDUSTRY 137

CHAPTER XVIII — A DRAMA OF SUCCESS—AND FAILURE 147

CHAPTER XIX  — AUTOMOBILES ON A NEW SCALE 156

CHAPTER XX — MEN GREATER THAN MACHINES 162

CHAPTER XXI — THE RIGHT MEN FOR THE RIGHT JOBS 170

CHAPTER XXII — SKIDS, CRASHES AND RECOVERIES 175

CHAPTER XXIII — FORD METHODS 183

CHAPTER XXIV — THE SETTING OF A STAR 184

CHAPTER XXV — THIS WHIRLING WORLD 184

BIBLIOGRAPHY 184

THE CARS OF YESTERYEAR 184

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 184

DEDICATION

To

CARL M. GREEN

THE FRIEND WHO SUGGESTED

THIS BOOK

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

IT IS a pleasure as well as an obligation for the writer to cite the names of men high in the automotive industry and activities allied with it, who have contributed anecdote, fact, and impression from their personal experience to the material of this book. They include numerous leaders in the industry itself, nationally known advertising specialists, editors who have been familiar with the trade and its practices for years, lawyers whose practice has brought them into the most intimate touch with problems and personalities of the business.

Almost invariably I have found that the men who have attained the greatest distinction and success have been most courteous. Study of their accomplishments and personal contact with them, however brief, leave an indelible impression of competence superior to all obstacles. The observer is convinced that they won their rewards, whether financial or otherwise, on merit.

Charles W. Nash happened to be the first of the great men of the industry whom I was privileged to meet. He gives an impression of power under control which has made the automobile industry great. An hour’s interview with Walter P. Chrysler produced a similar impression. Roy D. Chapin did the same, at his office and in his home. To my material obligation he contributed not only his personal recollections of thirty-six years in the industry, but rare documentary data from his private collection. His untimely death only a few weeks later was a loss to the world.

Henry B. Joy, Bernard F. Everitt, Norval Hawkins, to name only a few of the earlier important figures in the industry, were similarly courteous and generous.

Advertising men who have had the opportunity to observe automotive history and personalities through the years, and who, because of the nature of their profession, take a more objective view of those personalities than do the men in the industry proper, contributed time, information and comment. My thanks and appreciation are due especially to Lee Anderson, to Theodore F. MacManus and W. A. P. John of Mac Manus, John & Adams, to W. S. Power of Campbell-Ewald Company.

Others who have been in close touch with automotive development and personalities in the world’s center of the industry for years, and who were most helpful with information and assistance in research, include Chris Sinsabaugh, editor of the Automotive Daily News, Malcolm Bingay, editor of the Detroit Free Press, H. M. Nimmo, editor of Detroit Saturday Night, Paul Hale Bruske, William Chittenden of the Book-Cadillac Hotel, Charles Hughes of the Detroit Athletic Club, Alfred O. Dunk, John Heinze.

Numerous others who, for various reasons, prefer that they should not be quoted directly, are recorded in my notes. These include persons connected with the Ford organization, where I spent considerable time unhampered by the restrictions usually imposed upon visitors. My thanks go to them also.

To the Detroit Public Library, which made available the Burton Historical Collection, and the books, files and indexes in other departments, I am deeply indebted.

Meeting so many persons, of such variety of personality and accomplishment in the course of research has been a delight, and a stimulation. Out of it all has come a book which is designed not as comprehensive history of the automobile industry, but as a reflection of the high accomplishment of noteworthy Americans devoting their energy and ability toward a great end. I hope they will enjoy and approve of it, and accept my thanks.

C. B. GLASSCOCK

Laguna Beach, Calif.

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Model K, six-cylinder Ford of 1905

The first Ford shop, where the first Ford car was built in 1893, in the rear of Henry Ford’s home on Bagley Avenue, Detroit

The first successful gasoline-powered Oldsmobile

The Oldsmobile of 1936

The first Cadillac with the first steering wheel to be installed on an American automobile

V-8 Cadillac-Fleetwood convertible coupé (1936)

Facsimile of the Ford Motor Company payroll in 1904

The first Packard in Detroit with Henry B. Joy at the tiller

The curved-dash Oldsmobile runabout (1901), first of the quantity production cars in America

The first Ford with Henry Ford at the tiller

The first home and factory of the Ford Motor Company, Detroit

A modernistic view of the fourth Ford factory, Dearborn, Michigan

Charles F. Kettering

William C. Durant

The first Chevrolet which W. C. Durant drove into renewed control of General Motors

William Knudsen

Charles W. Nash

Henry Ford

Walter P. Chrysler

THE GASOLINE AGE

CHAPTER I — A VISION BECOMES REALITY

AS FAR back in history as the Old Testament, some thousands of years B.C., the Prophet Ezekiel recorded a vision in which he saw the spirit of the living creature within four wheels which were cutting up such capers that, were it in 1937 A.D., we would think one had blown out a tire at seventy miles per hour.

It was not a very clear vision. There was nothing in it about crankshafts or hydraulic brakes. If there were any high compression or internal combustion, it must have been within Ezekiel. But there was a mention of rings, and a suggestion of steering, or maybe it was the first recorded skid—and they turned not when they went.

That may have been the first vision of an automobile, but if so it lacked numerous essential specifications. Absolutely nothing was done about it. Those Israelites who could raise what served the purpose of the modern down-payment continued to ride in chariots, at times fiery in their dreams but extremely bumpy in service. That aristocratic form of conveyance, occasionally supplemented by a slave-borne sedan, continued in vogue through many centuries. So perhaps any impression of Ezekiel as the man who thought up the automobile should be written off.

Probably there is in America a more popular but equally erroneous idea that Henry Ford did it. Persons old enough to have learned by experience that the safest and most economical method of stopping a speeding car is to lift the right foot from the accelerator and apply it gradually to the brake pedal at some distance before the contemplated stop, may also be old enough to remember that Charles E. Duryea made the first gas-motored automobile in America to run on the road, in 1892. Bald heads, of that era, will recall that Henry Ford demonstrated his first horseless buggy in 1893, and that Elwood Haynes did the same in 1894. They will recall that Ransom E. Olds, having built and operated a steam-driven vehicle in 1891, produced his first successful gas-driven car in 1897, Alexander Winton built one that would run in 1895.

Those five men, each working independently, without knowledge of the other’s problems or help from the other’s experience, were the progenitors of the gasoline aristocracy of America. And what an aristocracy! Hard-headed, keen-minded, brusque, polished, overalled, tailored, egotistic, modest, whisky-drinking, teetotaling, blue-blooded, common clay, theorists, scientists, mechanics, producers, promoters, salesmen, Americans!

Devotion to facts forces the admission that not one of them invented the automobile. A few thousand years after Ezekiel’s colorful but confused vision someone around the Mediterranean tried a clock-work vehicle, but not until Nicholas Joseph Cugnot, an imaginative Frenchman, built a three-wheel steam-driven tractor in Paris shortly before the Declaration of Independence was signed in America, was any vehicle known to run under power generated within itself. And that one was wrecked while attempting to turn a corner at three miles per hour.

Another hundred years passed before George B. Selden, a young attorney, of Rochester, New York, conceived a gas-powered vehicle, and that was based to some extent upon European ideas. And it required a third of a century to get that automobile built so that it would run—in 1905. During the century several persons, notably in England, had developed steam-driven road vehicles. In its later decades several others, mostly French and German, had constructed gas-motored carriages that would run. William Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa, generally receives the credit for building the first electric automobile in America, in 1891.

Ever since its arrival [in Chicago] it has attracted the greatest attention, the Western Electrician reported in its issue of September 17, 1892. The sight of a well loaded carriage moving along the streets at a spanking pace, with no horses in front, and apparently with nothing on board to give it motion, was one that has been too much, even for the wide awake Chicagoan. In passing through the business section, way had to be cleared by the police for the passage of the carriage.

But that was an electric, powered by a storage battery. In the next few years machines of similar type grew in favor and multiplied in numbers as did steam cars such as those built by the Stanleys, Whites and others. Their day of ascendancy was comparatively brief. Gasoline soon proved itself to be the life blood of the automobile industry. Those men who recognized the possibilities of that explosive fluid, and developed machines in which they utilized its power, were the pioneers of the stupendous American automobile industry of today. Those five men—Duryea, Olds, Ford, Haynes and Winton—started the gasoline aristocracy of America. To them—all of them—must go the honor. To Ford alone, perhaps, will be conceded the glory, the power and the wealth.

No one, in the experimental ‘nineties, imagined that he was founding an aristocracy of competence and accomplishment. Neither did Detroit, basking beneath its trees and fanned by the breezes from its great river, imagine that it would become the world-famous seat of such an aristocracy. The French settlers, the fur-traders, the stove-makers, the foundry owners, the railroad pioneers had already formed an aristocracy sufficient unto a city of some two hundred thousand population. No one imagined that within the generation presidents of the United States and royalty of the Old World would be exchanging honors with farmers, mechanics, photographers, miners, salesmen, immigrants, who had attained the heights in motordom. No one imagined that an older aristocracy, an aristocracy of land and wealth and the breeding of several generations would be displaced by an aristocracy of accomplishment climbing to power and riches and established position within one generation.

No one suspected that Edsel Ford, a child perched upon a kitchen table watching his father tinker with a sputtering contraption of gas pipe and old iron in the kitchen sink, would one day be entertaining the Prince of Wales at dinner in his home. No one suspected that Roy D. Chapin, a college boy excited by his first view of an automobile, would win and hold such high place in the industry that the portfolio of Secretary of Commerce in the Hoover Cabinet would be only an incidental honor. No one thought that William (christened Signius Wilhelm Poul) Knudsen would rise from a job in a Copenhagen bicycle shop to the position of executive vice-president of General Motors, and be knighted by King Christian of Denmark.

Detroit was familiar with the names of Newberry, Alger, Joy, McMillan, Cass, Beaubien, etc. They represented aristocracy to the Society-conscious Detroiters. The United States was familiar with the names of Vanderbilt, Roosevelt, Morgan, Drexel, Lodge, Cabot, Adams, etc. They represented aristocracy to all Americans. No one of note had ever heard of Walter Chrysler, an engine wiper, Charles W. Nash, a carriage trimmer, William C. Durant, a salesman, Hugh Chalmers, a salesman, John and Horace Dodge, mechanics, or a score of others who were to build up a new American aristocracy of accomplishment—the gasoline aristocracy.

Detroit did not recognize the possibilities in the ‘nineties any more than did the rest of the United States. There were only four gasoline-powered cars in this country in 1894. Of those, three had been built by Americans—Duryea, Ford and Haynes. The fourth, built by Carl Benz in Germany, was imported.

Detroit gave no more indication of becoming the capital of the automobile world than did Kokomo, Lansing, Springfield or Cleveland. Automobiles appeared to be the toys of wealthy men or the contraptions of experimenting mechanics. Probably a large proportion of the persons who have reached the age of fifty in the United States first saw an automobile as a feature of a circus parade. Very often, to the hilarious delight of farmers and towns-people gathered along plank sidewalks beside dusty or muddy streets the automobile could not make the mile circuit of the parade, and had to be towed into the lot behind the lion wagon with its four great, plumed horses.

Alexander Winton was the first man to turn rustic derision into good advertising by reversing the usual order of the circus parade incident, effectively putting the cart before the horse. Detroit, all unaware of the dynamic possibilities of the automobile, was moved to mirth by the passage through its streets of a Winton car drawn by a span of horses. The bucolic cry of Get a Horse! which had been greeting public appearances of horseless carriages through the ‘nineties was answered literally and effectively.

But this two-horsepowered automobile carried a placard announcing that no one could operate it without the aid of the horses. The incident amused Detroiters and confirmed the skepticism of rustics gathered by the way, but it hurt the pride and menaced the budding sales record of the Winton representative, whose factory was in Cleveland. A few hours later, therefore, a Winton car followed the same route under its own power, drawing a farm wagon within which rode a dejected-looking donkey. Upon the car and wagon were placards suggesting that only a donkey could find himself unable to drive a Winton.

The improvement of the automobile since those days is indicated by the fact that even a jackass can drive one now, and plenty of them do.

Such was the publicity for the automobile when men who are now only fifty years old were boys of ten to fifteen, as eagerly interested in the new machines as their sons today are interested in airplanes, radios and television. No publicity worthy of the name came forth from the Duryea workshop, the Olds shop, the Haynes-Apperson shop with the first gas-powered automobiles. They didn’t even call them automobiles. The common term was horseless buggy. H. H. Kohlsaat’s Times-Herald in Chicago, promoting the first automobile race in America in 1895, incidentally offered a prize of five hundred dollars for the best generic name for the contraptions. Motocycle won the money, although quadricycle was popular, petrocar was considered. The French name, automobile, was not in the running.

Charles E. Duryea entered what he called a buggyaut, his second practical car. With it he won the race from Jackson Park, Chicago, to Evanston and return, about fifty-two miles at an average speed of seven and one-half miles per hour. An imported Benz was the only other car to finish, out of five which actually left the starting line. Those five, of which three were built in Europe, represented an original list of sixty entries, most of which were by inventors with plenty of ideas but no money, and no automobile. The sad fact was that there were not enough automobiles and drivers in the United States in 1895 to make a race worthy of Mr. Kohlsaat’s five thousand dollars in cash prizes. Because of that the start was postponed from the original date, July Fourth, to Labor Day, again to November second, and finally to Thanksgiving Day.

Charles Duryea and his brother Frank had organized the first automobile factory in America in Springfield, Massachusetts, under the name of the Duryea Motor Wagon Company only two months earlier. With the important stimulation of two thousand dollars first prize in the Chicago race they promptly set about the building of a dozen cars. Four of those cars they completed in time to enter in John Brisben Walker’s Cosmopolitan Magazine race from the New York City Hall to Irvington-on-the-Hudson and return, Memorial Day, 1896. Competing against several foreign and a few American-made cars they won all the prizes, totaling three thousand dollars. Quickly then they completed production of their first year’s schedule of twelve machines. They sold three, sent one on tour with Barnum & Bailey’s circus, and shipped two others to England. There they planned to compete in an international race of fifty-odd miles from London to Brighton. That race, November 14, 1896, was in the nature of a celebration of repeal of a British law which had restricted automobile development in England for half a century by requiring that a man on foot, carrying a red flag, must precede each horseless vehicle at a speed of not more than four miles an hour.

More than forty automobiles, variously powered by gas, steam and electricity, were entered in the big event. Most of them were French and German machines of types which had made a successful showing in the world’s first automobile race, from Paris to Rouen, about eighty miles, in July, 1894. Similar machines had won international acclaim in the competition from Paris to Bordeaux, seven hundred and forty-four miles, in 1895. The Duryeas were permitted to start near the tail of the procession. Despite the difficulties of dust and stalled cars on the narrow road, Frank Duryea worked his way into the lead and drove the Duryea machine into Brighton nearly an hour ahead of his nearest competitor.

Duryea had beaten the world. His place in the history of the automobile business in America was assured. Few will deny that between the year 1892 when he demonstrated the first gas-powered automobile to run in America and the year 1896, when a Duryea car won the great international race in England he accomplished more than any other man in the initial stimulation of the present vast automobile business in the United States. That he lacked something essential to the development of his business as successfully as he had developed and advertised his car is beside the point.

The interests of the Duryea brothers soon parted. The Duryea Motor Wagon Company passed out of existence, one of the first of hundreds of automobile companies to do so. Frank Duryea became associated with the Stevens Arms Company in the manufacture of gasoline automobiles. The Stevens-Duryea rather than the Duryea buggyaut is the name more familiar in the roll-call of American automobiles.

All that was of vital importance to the early stimulation of the industry. The fact that in later years considerable difference of opinion made its appearance as to priority in manufacture, first sales, and improvement of essential parts merely serves to indicate how independently the pioneers were working. Not one had any direct help or information from another. This record is not designed to judge between the claims. Where those claims conflict probably it is merely another indication of the fact that in the ‘nineties practically no one in the United States except a few experimenting mechanics was interested in automobiles. Americans were interested in the first Chicago World’s Fair, the panic of ‘93 which extended into a four-year depression, the Klondike gold-rush, the Spanish-American War.

Probably the pioneers of the automobile industry were all honest in their contentions. They simply did not know what the other fellow was doing. Few and inadequate records were kept. There was no clearing house of information such as the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce of today. There was no individual sufficiently interested to collate claims which did not appear to conflict until years later. Alexander Winton has been most frequently credited with making the first commercial sale of an American gasoline automobile, in 1898. Some authorities give him credit for putting the industry on a commercial basis as of that date. In contradiction is Charles E. Duryea’s assertion that he sold three cars manufactured in the Duryea Motor Wagon Company’s plant in 1896. Elwood Haynes has asserted that he and the Appersons sold a gas car to a Mr. Lewis of Poughkeepsie, New York, late in 1896 or early in 1897, and another to Doctor Sweeney of Chicago in 1897.

But Mr. Haynes has also claimed to have fathered the first American gasoline car to run successfully, on July 4, 1894. Possibly it was the first he had ever heard of, but unquestionably it was not the first to run. If he were so clearly in error on that point he may also have been in error as to the date of the first sale. Henry Ford has been quoted as saying that his first sale was in 1896 when he disposed of his gas buggy to Charles Ainsley of Detroit for two hundred dollars after having driven it about one thousand miles. Probably no one will deny that that was the first used-car sale.

It really is of little importance except to the sticklers for the minutiae of historical accuracy. It all goes to show the lack, the confusion and the disparity of records in the automobile game only forty years ago. Even some of the men who have appeared most positive of their authority have made strange contradictions of what later have been admitted as facts. For example: Motor, one of the leading magazines of the trade since the early days, in an article by Alexander Johnson in January, 1918, gives Elwood Haynes credit for producing a practical road vehicle driven by a marine motor in 1893, while the same magazine in an article by W. A. P. John in January, 1922, makes the year of that successful demonstration 1894. Such an oft-quoted authority as H. L. Barber, in his Story of the Automobile, published in 1917, says the first successful steam car in the United States was built by S. H. Roper in Massachusetts in 1889, while Arthur Pound, author of The Turning Wheel, says John and Thomas Clegg, in their machine shop in Memphis, Michigan, built a steam car which ran five hundred miles over Michigan roads in 1885. A man so thoroughly respected for devotion to facts as Peter Clark Macfarlane, in an article published in Collier’s in January, 1915, makes the palpable error that Henry Ford’s first car, running on the streets of Detroit in 1892-3, was steam driven, and that not until late in 1896 did Ford produce his first gasoline automobile.

More popular, and far more widely circulated, is what might properly be called the Henry Ford myth, That myth is to the effect that Henry Ford in his youth was inspired with a vision of a light, strong, efficient, simple automobile which could be produced in large quantities and made available at low cost to vast numbers of persons; that he stuck to that one idea through thick and thin, never wavering in purpose, never taking his eye off the goal, until he became the greatest individual manufacturer with the largest private fortune in the world.

Without attempting to take any credit from Henry Ford for his great accomplishments, that widely accepted myth is false. The facts are that he worked for ten years to produce his first half-dozen automobiles; that the first two automobile manufacturing companies with which he was associated as chief shop executive folded up; that he was forty years old before he began to build cars profitably, and even then he built and offered a line of heavy twenty-eight-hundred-dollar cars which were a commercial failure; that not for fifteen years after he had demonstrated his first horseless buggy did he get a real start toward fame and fortune with the Model T. In evidence that he had no such vision as has been credited to him in the years of his great success is the fact that in 1908, the year in which he launched the Model T, he was willing and ready to sell the Ford Motor Company for three million dollars.

Facts or errors, they have all made little difference in the development of the automobile industry. Contradictions as to dates and priority in this or that incident of invention, manufacture, sale, merely tend to show that America in general was keeping no automobile data and revealing no interest in automobiles forty years ago.

To the modern youth in a modern automobile trying with more or less success to beat a railroad train to a grade crossing, the spectacle of a world without motor cars is almost beyond conception. Yet that youth’s father lived in such a world, and probably was as skeptical about the future of the few new horseless carriages and their builders as the boy is ignorant and contemptuous of their past. Illustrations of the skepticism once known and shared by almost every person in the United States now past the age of forty are numerous. They must be amusing to the present generation.

CHAPTER II — GET A HORSE!

THE first revealing incident of the complete skepticism of America concerning the future of motor transportation appears in a reported failure of George B. Selden to interest capital in his project. Selden was seeking to develop the patent on a projected gasoline-motor vehicle.

The Selden patent and the litigation which it caused are familiar to oldsters who were directly interested in automobiles thirty to forty years ago. But the men who were interested in it then probably did not comprise one-tenth of one per cent of the population of the United States. Those who have any accurate idea of the Selden patent business today probably do not comprise one-twentieth of one per cent. Yet that patent and the suits pertaining to it which dragged through the courts for years were the most important news of motordom for a decade. Because it was technical, the lay public took little interest.

Selden applied for his patent in 1879. It was refused because the papers were not properly drawn. He kept the application alive for sixteen years by various methods, and the patent was issued to him in 1895. If it had been all that he claimed for it, Selden and his heirs would have had a monopoly of the entire automobile business of the country. Think what that might have meant in cramping the development of automobiles in America.

But it was the very extent of Selden’s vision that led to failure. Having obtained the patent, he needed money to build the car. He himself was not a mechanic but an attorney interested in mechanics. The patent was based upon an assembly of ideas and drawings from a motor built by George В. В ray ton, an Englishman living in Boston, supplemented with Selden’s own ideas of a transmission. It appeared sufficiently original for the United States Government to grant the patent even after Duryea, Ford and Haynes had built gas-motor vehicles that would run, and while Selden had no such vehicle. Then came the incident revealing American skepticism as to the possibilities of automobiles in general.

Seeking funds with which to build his first car, Selden finally found a man with five thousand dollars available. In his enthusiasm he told the man that they would live to see more carriages run by motor on the main street of Rochester than were then drawn by horses. That was too much for the prospect. He declared Selden crazy, and walked out. Ten more years passed before Selden could get the machine built, and then it ran only enough to appear in evidence in the patent suit. Those were the years in which the popular cry, Get a Horse! greeted almost every automobile which appeared on the roads. In the meantime the patent had been assigned to the Electric Vehicle Company of New Jersey, dominated by William C. Whitney and Thomas F. Ryan. Details of the important battles growing out of that patent will be told in later chapters.

In the meantime there was further evidence of the skepticism with which the American public looked upon the budding automobile business. Henry Ford had what appeared to be two failures behind him in a little more than three years of attempted manufacturing on a commercial scale. He had quit the Detroit Automobile Company by mutual consent, and had written off the Henry Ford Automobile Company after a few months of grief. He was organizing the Ford Motor Company in a third effort to make good. This story was told to me by Norval A. Hawkins, auditor and first sales manager of the Ford Motor Company.

Alexander Y. Malcolmson, a Detroit coal dealer, had been induced to put up some money for Ford. At the time Hawkins was an auditor and public accountant in Detroit, with Malcolmson as one of his clients. One bright morning a good-looking, well-dressed man called at Hawkins’ office, and asked if Hawkins could do a small job of auditing for him. He identified himself as a coal jobber from Cleveland, and explained that he had a customer in Detroit who had failed to meet a recent bill for seven thousand two hundred dollars. He had been advised by friends that this customer was dabbling in some silly automobile venture, and had actually put money into it. So he wanted an audit of the coal dealer’s books to safeguard himself against loss. No sound business man, he believed, could invest money in an automobile project and remain sound. The name of his customer was Malcolmson.

Hawkins grinned, and explained that he was Malcolmson’s auditor, and that he knew all about the books, the capital and the credit of the coal dealer, but that it would be hardly ethical to disclose that information without his client’s permission and approval. However, he was perfectly willing to take the jobber over to the coal dealer’s office and put the matter up to him. The jobber agreed, Hawkins made the contact, and Malcolmson controlled an incipient outburst of temper. It took only a