Contemporary historians point out that in Egypt, more than four thousand years ago, those who bore bad tidings to the reigning monarch were in the habit of meeting death so swiftly that they could scarcely have been incommoded by the circumstance. In fact, they had all the satisfaction of inevitable demise with none of the discomforts necessarily attendant on lingering annihilation.

Mr. Samuel Gunterson, returning from Boston with the signed contract of Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy, presently found himself in the position of sensing all the restlessness and unhappiness of an expiring frame with no hope of an early easement by carefree and cheerful decease. For the news of his first important agency appointment was received by William Street in a manner not at all calculated to flatter the man who had made it. Of the numerous opinions expressed or unexpressed, ranging from polite incredulity to unholy joy or open contempt, the only quality which all these opinions held in common was their invidiousness.

The appointment received perhaps its most kindly treatment from those most directly concerned. Mr. Wintermuth did not know anything about Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy—in fact, he had never heard of them. And so, when Mr. Gunterson, in his most convincing rhetoric; explained the merits of the new agents and the increased income which he felt confident the Guardian would receive, the President gave his assent, merely expressing his deep regret at concluding his business relations with Silas Osgood.

"But Mr. Osgood is retiring from the firm, anyway," said Mr. Gunterson.

"Indeed? I am glad to hear it," said Mr. Wintermuth.

With which comment the matter came to its discussion's end between them. Nor did the President learn for a long time the real truth regarding his Boston appointees, for with increasing years he had grown increasingly difficult of access and intolerant of ideas conceived on the outside and not in accord with his own. The men who once could have come to him and frankly told him that the Guardian's Boston appointment was a colossal blunder were, like himself, grown insensibly out of the true current of underwriting affairs, while those who knew the truth lacked either the purpose or the opportunity to lay before him the exact state of affairs.

Among those who could not carry out their inclinations was Smith, for he saw very little of Mr. Wintermuth in these early days of the premiership of Gunterson; and he felt, moreover, that the President, knowing his opinion of Mr. Gunterson, would be inclined to discount his criticism on matters connected with the administration of the Vice-President. So Mr. Wintermuth lived in ignorance until the results began to show on the surface—which was not a far day.

From William Street, however, the busy and irreverent Street, soon came the slings and arrows which pierced even Mr. Gunterson's almost impregnable self-esteem. Only a few days after his return he overheard a conversation between Mr. Cuyler and a placer, in the Guardian's own office, which showed how the Street regarded the Boston appointment.

"Sorry, but I can't take that, Eddy; we don't write the shoe polish manufacturers at all—there's too much naphtha used, and they all burn eventually," were the words that caught his attention, and in the shadow of the door he waited for the reply.

"Ah, come off, now—loosen up! I know the Guardian does write the class, for this same concern's got a factory in Boston and I got a Guardian policy on it only yesterday. That's why I'm giving you this. Your Boston agents, Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy, place the Boston end for us. What's the matter—don't your agents have any prohibited list, or do you let them do things you can't do in your own office?"

"Eddy," said Mr. Cuyler, sternly, "you're talking nonsense. I tell you we don't write the class in my department, and I don't believe the agency department does. The Boston firm you mention has just been appointed, and probably they don't know our underwriting policy yet." He handed back the binder.

The placer, realizing that the decision was final, and irritated at the declination of a risk which he had found impossible to place elsewhere, laughed loudly.

"Don't know your underwriting policy, hey? Well, they don't need to—they've got an underwriting policy of their own. Do you know what it is? It's to take a line on anything that's not actually on fire. They're the slop bucket of Boston, the standard lemon of Kilby Street; they've got a loss ratio of three thousand per cent, and they've burnt the hide off every company that's ever touched them. You make me tired. You're a fine, consistent bunch, you are—to pose as a conservative company in New York and write every skate in Boston through Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy! All right—good-by."

And in his exit his coat sleeve almost brushed against the man in the hall who in his haste and folly had appointed Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy to represent the Guardian in the good city of Boston.

This was but the beginning. After this overture the stings and slurs came thick and fast. It seemed to the dismayed Vice-President that every one in New York took delight in recalling to publicity some detail discreditable to his Bostonian discovery. From all over the East he began to receive applications for agencies from men whom even he knew to be unworthy of trust; and he realized that he had encouraged their approach like vultures on the unhappy Guardian. Within a fortnight of making the Boston appointment he had seriously considered revoking it; but this would have necessitated the admission of his initial error, and he lacked the courage to carry out his better judgment. So, with a shrug of his mental shoulders and a cynical reflection that good luck might perhaps avert the results of his imprudence, he let the matter stand.

But good luck failed to materialize, and it was not long before the expected began to happen. Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy's business appeared outwardly passable, but curiously enough it almost always seemed—after the loss—that the risk was one on which the company should never have been committed. And there were two unpleasant incidents where the Guardian was "caught on a binder"—where the loss occurred before the agents could issue the policy or report the acceptance of the risk to the New York office; and though Smith investigated these, and in each case was obliged to hold the agents blameless, the experience left an unfortunate impression. However, Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy undoubtedly controlled an unusually large volume of business. If losses were heavy, so were premiums, and the relatively small losses which naturally attend a growing business where no policy has been in force more than a month or two, postponed, for a time at least, the worst of the evil days. But long before they came the heavens had grown dark with trouble in numerous other quarters.

The general ruling of the Conference, providing that, except under almost impossible qualifications and with reduced compensation, no agent could continue to represent both Conference and non-Conference companies, was now in effect. And it seemed as though never before had there been such precision and unanimity in Conference methods; and Smith, gloomily regarding the grim spectacle of the Guardian's decline, could only curse under his breath the act of O'Connor that had brought about this state of affairs.

Certainly there was no hesitancy about the Conference campaign, and the results became at once apparent in the non-Conference offices. Hardly a day passed which failed to bring to the Guardian the resignation of one or more of its agents, with none to take their places except the vultures, many of whom Mr. Gunterson remembered to have assisted in accelerating the downfall of some of the other underwriting institutions with which he had been connected. With a chill of dismay he read of what a splendid opening awaited the Guardian in the general agency of Henry Trafalgar and Company of Memphis, or Bates and Newsome of Atlanta.

From the Guardian's own agents the letters of resignation were very much alike, for the company was popular in a modest way, and most of the writers had represented it for many years.

"We are notified by the committee in charge of this district," they wrote, "that in order to secure the customary graded commission scale we must resign our non-Conference companies. We are extremely sorry to let the Guardian go, but the difference to us financially is such that we would not feel justified in declining the Conference offer."

And so, one after one, they went. Many an agent wrote bitterly attacking the Conference procedure and asking whether the Guardian could not arrange to take care of his entire business, and stating that if this could be done he would retain the Guardian and let the others go. This, however, in nearly every case was out of the question, and eventually all these agencies went with their fellows. During the first month of the new year almost one hundred agents, some of them among the most satisfactory and profitable of the Guardian's plant, had been compelled to resign. The income from these agencies reached to the neighborhood of one hundred thousand dollars annually, and Mr. Wintermuth began to take decided notice of his strategic position.

Of course, whenever an agency was lost, there was the possibility of replacing the company in some non-Conference office; but this was not so easy a matter. The non-Conference agents were principally lower grade, cut-rate concerns, and not of the standard either professionally or financially to which the Guardian was accustomed. The company's field men, continually confronted by the discouraging task of finding in a town a satisfactory agent, when none existed save in Conference offices, became disheartened. Their letters to the home office indicated their demoralization and Mr. Gunterson could not think how to direct their campaigns for them.

At this juncture the hand on the reins needed to be both delicate and firm, and the hand of Mr. Gunterson, while it may have had its moments of inflexibility, was never delicate. And it was firm with less and less frequency as the days went by. Never any too well convinced, at the bottom of his heart, of the soundness of any course he elected to pursue, the apparent necessity of sitting helplessly in his office and watching his agency plant disintegrate before his eyes robbed him of much of the assurance that had always been one of his predominant factors. Outwardly his manner remained as impressive as ever, but it was retained with an ever increasing difficulty.

In this dark hour his only sustaining reflection was that this rule, which was working such havoc among the Guardian's smaller agencies, did not apply to the larger cities whence came a large proportion of the company's premium income. Boston, of course, with a local rule even more radical than that of the field generally, had gone the way of the small towns; but in New York separation was out of the question since most of the important companies maintained their own local departments, dispensing with agents altogether; in Philadelphia the local underwriters had never been able to agree among themselves on any drastic measures and there seemed no likelihood of a change; while in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore soothingly sepulchral silence and calm reigned.

As the month of January gave place to the briefest of his brothers, a temporary lull in hostilities appeared to have arrived. Mr. Gunterson, drawing a long breath, was wondering if it could be possible that the worst of the tempest had passed, when eruptions from three craters burst forth almost simultaneously, and by the light of their flames it was seen that all which had gone before was of minor moment compared to that which was now to come.

It was about the third week in February that a Conference war was declared in Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Baltimore. In the ears of Mr. Gunterson the triple detonation rang terribly, like the very voice of doom, and it was with the desperation of hopelessness that he addressed himself to the solution of this new problem.

He no longer trusted himself as direct mediator; his Boston experience had cured him of all personal meddlesomeness; it was much more dignified to remain quietly in New York directing the efforts of his subordinates and criticizing them when they failed to accomplish the impossible. He did not care to expose himself to another Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy triumvirate. So he sat in his office, dictating letters and giving endless pieces of impracticable advice to special agents who inwardly cursed; and to Mr. Wintermuth he bore weirdly distorted versions of situations and crises beyond any power of his to unravel or even to explain.

Even on matters of fact he was pleasingly vague.

"How many agencies have we lost?" the President demanded on one occasion.

"Really, I could hardly say exactly," Mr. Gunterson responded. "You see, some that haven't actually resigned have stopped sending us business—to any extent. But," he added, "we can more than make up such losses in income when our new appointments show the full results of their business."

"How long do you calculate that's going to take?" abruptly inquired the usually courteous Mr. Wintermuth.

Mr. Gunterson did not know, but he was decidedly of the opinion that it could not be very long before the tide was stemmed.

But as the days went by the tide continued to run in the same direction. Baltimore, threatening dire things, hung trembling in the balance; Buffalo had already gone over to the enemy; Philadelphia was as yet hesitating before the final irrevocable leap. So February wore away, and March entered.

James Wintermuth was more disturbed than he had been at any time covered by what was now a good and had once been a miraculous memory. His company had so long been his pride, his reliance, his solace, and almost his gospel that he had grown to think of it as a sort of fixed star, whose light perhaps might be exceeded by some larger and more pretentious luminary, but which would nevertheless shine steadily on, beyond the fear of any cosmic upheaval.

Now he beheld it not only overclouded, but even menaced—beheld its light in danger of being dimmed if not utterly extinguished. It was absurd, it was tragic, it was unbelievable—yet it was so. And when he was confronted with the fact, there crept back into the old gentleman's heart something of his old fire, as well as a slow, brooding sense of angry injury against the men or forces responsible for his present difficulties. His elder resentment was of course against O'Connor, who was taking advantage in every way of the Guardian's misfortunes; but as the palpably weakening hold of the company brought him more closely in touch with its underwriting affairs, as the questionable losses from Boston and other similar agencies began to arrive in faster and faster succession, and he clearly perceived the weakness and incapability of Gunterson's management, his irritation rightly directed itself more and more against the luckless Vice-President.

One other thing of recent occurrence had shaken—perhaps out of proportion to its consequences—what little confidence he still felt in the judgment of his underwriting manager. That related to the attempt of Mr. Gunterson to inject his advice into the Guardian's affairs financial. Early in February he had suggested to Mr. Wintermuth the advisability of purchasing for the Guardian some bonds of an embryonic steel company then erecting a plant in Alabama. Mr. Gunterson knew personally some of the people back of this, the bonds seemed remarkably cheap, and the bonus in common stock made the proposition in his opinion decidedly attractive. Mr. Wintermuth's investigation of the concern and its prospectus had quickly convinced him that its officers were of far more capability in the industry of disposing of what, by a polite extension of the term, might be called securities than in manufacturing steel, and a skeptical investing public evidently reached the same conclusion, for within a month after Mr. Gunterson's friendly suggestion, the Birmingham Bessemer Steel Corporation was in the hands of a receiver, who, after some hesitation, issued a statement to the effect that the bondholders might eventually realize fifteen cents on every dollar they had paid in.

On the second day of March an unusual thing happened. Mr. Cuyler entered the elevator and mounted to the top floor of the Guardian building, crossing the floor toward Mr. Wintermuth's office.

"Hello! What are you doing up here?" Smith inquired, knowing the stars must be strangely out of their courses to attract Mr. Cuyler to this unaccustomed altitude. A true local department man is always uncomfortable, never at home, above the grade floor. "Has the Sub-Treasury or the Aquarium made a total loss, or what's the matter?" he cheerfully proceeded.

"No," said Cuyler, sourly. And without further answer he passed on into the President's room.

"Good-afternoon, Mr. Cuyler," said the President, amiably, but the local secretary with a glum face stopped him.

"Well, we've lost O'Brien," he said.

"What's that?" demanded the other. "Lost O'Brien? What do you mean?
Not O'Brien of One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street?"

"That's the man. The best branch manager we ever had—the man we kept when the Exchange made us close all our branch offices but one. Well, he's thrown us."

"Thrown us! O'Brien? Why, he's been with us for fifteen years! Tell me about this at once, sir."

"There's nothing to tell, or nothing much," replied the local secretary, bitterly. "The business he's been giving us has been dropping off,—we haven't got a new risk out of him in a month and we've been losing a lot of our renewals,—and yesterday Charlie saw his placer going into the Salamander office with a bundle of binders."

"The Salamander? O'Connor!"

"Yes, sir, O'Connor. So to-day I went around to the restaurant where he eats when he comes down town. He was there."

"O'Brien, you mean? Well, what did he say?"

"He said," replied Cuyler, slowly, "that he had no complaint to make of the way we'd treated him, but that the Salamander was offering him facilities which we didn't offer him, and he felt obliged to do something for them."

"He means they're paying him excess brokerage or something of that sort," said Mr. Wintermuth, acidly.

"Yes, I suppose so, but of course that's a thing you can't say unless you're in a position to prove it. Anyhow, he's gone—and about twenty thousand dollars worth of preferred business with a thirty per cent loss ratio for ten years has gone with him."

The President rose and walked up and down his office. This was bringing the fight to his very door, with a vengeance.

"What can we do about it?" he said, stopping in front of Cuyler and fixing on that dismayed person a vaguely furious gaze.

"I don't know. I suppose we'll have to hunt around and dig up another branch manager in O'Brien's place. It'll take a lot of hunting, though. You don't pick up a business like that every day in the week."

The President could make no better suggestion, and in this instance he did not call the Vice-President into conference.

"Do the best you can, then," he said shortly; "and let me know how you're getting along."

Mr. Cuyler descended gloomily to his proper milieu, and took up the task of finding a branch office manager to replace the recreant O'Brien. But agents like O'Brien were few, and most of the best of them had their own old-established connections with other companies. Again, the Guardian's reputation for conservatism made Cuyler's task the harder. One or two, after considering the matter, were frightened away by their dread lest the Guardian accept nothing but their more desirable risks, making it all the more difficult for them to place those that were not so desirable. The Guardian's local secretary had as wide an acquaintance as any man on the Street, but he found himself confronted by an exceedingly difficult problem.

Meanwhile a branch manager must be secured. The company's local income was dropping behind in a way that had not happened within the memory of man. In this state of affairs it was not long before Cuyler again sought Mr. Wintermuth, and this time the advice of Mr. Gunterson was solicited.

It had been nearly a week since Mr. Gunterson had been impaled upon any very serious dilemma, and in this interval he had regained much of his shaken confidence, so that he addressed himself to the solution of Mr. Cuyler's difficulties with much of his pristine assurance.

"Why not get Joe Darkner? He's got a fine class of business and a lot of it," he suggested at once.

"Yes, but he's sewed up body and soul with the National of Norway,"
Cuyler responded shortly.

"Well, what's the matter with Hart and Leith?"

"Nothing but East Side stuff. Besides, they're dead ones—won't last out the year," replied the local underwriter, somewhat impatiently. As though he had not canvassed such obvious possibilities as these!

"Why not try Schermerhorn and Snow?" was Mr. Gunterson's next suggestion.

The President broke into the discussion.

"They've been uptown managers of the Inland for twenty years. And Snow is a big stockholder in the company. We would be wasting our time to approach them."

There was a hint of contempt in his tone. A man who volunteered helpful advice about a difficult situation without being in possession of the most rudimentary information bearing on it was hardly worthy of serious attention. Perhaps the keen ear of the Vice-President detected this, for he flushed slightly, and was silent for a moment.

"I'll give the matter my attention," he said reassuringly to Cuyler. "I'm a little out of touch with local affairs, but I know plenty of first-rate uptown brokers, and I guess I can locate us to good advantage. I'll see you about it later."

And he made his majestic exit.

The matter being now under his august advisement, it might have been supposed that relief was in sight and a new and desirable connection as good as made. But in less than a week from the time of this conversation Mr. Cuyler again sought the President, and the expression of his face could not have been misinterpreted.

"Well, what's the matter now?" Mr. Wintermuth inquired, as the local underwriter seated himself.

"Who do you think is gone now?" said Cuyler, abruptly.

"Who?" demanded his superior officer.

"Jenkinson—and Hammond, Dow, and Company."

"Gone!" repeated the President, slowly. The brokers in question were known to be on the most friendly terms with the company, and it was generally supposed that the first choice of most of their business went to the Guardian. "Gone! What do you mean? Nothing has happened to either of those people! What are you talking of?"

"I mean they're gone, so far as the Guardian is concerned. We've taken as much as ten thousand a year from each of those offices. And now O'Connor's got them."

The President looked at him in silence.

"I knew something was the matter, and to-day I saw O'Connor and Jenkinson at lunch, laughing and talking as familiar as though they'd been friends for years. It's no use, sir—he's going after every really good broker that we've got attached to us."

"But the Salamander can't take care of all their business. Why, those two firms must do business with nearly every office on the Street, anyway."

"The Salamander will take all the best of the business we get now, or most of it, and help them out, I suppose, on a lot of tough risks that I've never been willing to write. O'Connor's a plunger, you know, when he's got a gambling company back of him. It looks to me as if we'd only get what he left—targets, and big lines where Jenkinson and Hammond Dow have enough to go round."

Mr. Cuyler's oldest friend had never seen him more troubled than at this moment. So deep, in fact, was his gloom that the President put aside his own concern to try to reassure his old counterman. In this he succeeded not at all; Mr. Cuyler's dejection was settled.

"What about a branch manager in place of O'Brien?" inquired Mr. Wintermuth at length, thinking at least to change the subject, and hoping to touch a brighter theme. Mr. Cuyler's face darkened still further, if such a thing were possible.

"Nothing doing," he said inelegantly but comprehensively.

"Hasn't Mr. Gunterson—?" the President began, but he stopped short.
"What's that?" he asked sharply. "What were you going to say?"

"I guess I'd better not say it," responded the local underwriter with deliberation.

"Go ahead," said his chief.

"Well, then," the other answered, "I was going to say 'To hell with
Gunterson!'"

Mr. Wintermuth leaned back in his chair, with his eyes fixed on his subordinate.

"Cuyler," he said, "Mr. Gunterson is your superior officer, and that was an entirely improper thing for you to say. But I've known you, Cuyler, for forty years, and I don't mind telling you that that is exactly what I have been wanting to say about Mr. Gunterson for the last three weeks."

A rueful smile broke through the gloom of both.

"Well, I'm glad you feel the same way about it, and I'm glad I got it out of my system; but I don't see that it helps things much, does it?" the local underwriter replied.

"I'm not so sure of that," said Mr. Wintermuth. "It helps me, and possibly the assistance will spread to the whole situation later on."

Meanwhile the gentleman who was thus summarily consigned to the infernal regions was doing his vague utmost to cope with three situations at once, any one of which would have been entirely beyond his capabilities to control. New York, Philadelphia, and the Eastern field as a whole,—each was a problem in itself, and each was getting farther and farther out of hand. The Guardian's field men were demoralized, beholding the fine agency plant of their company crumble and melt away while they stood helpless to hold it together. And Mr. Gunterson, when asked for remedies, could reply only in nebulous words of even more crepuscular and doubtful pertinence. New York was admittedly beyond him, and Philadelphia, harkening to siren voices that promised great things, was presently to vote on the separation rule for that city.

It is a depressing business, this watching the burning of one's own ancestral house, the sinking of one's proudest ship of all the fleet. It was altogether too much for Mr. Wintermuth. For nearly a week he was missing from the office, and no man at the Guardian knew of his whereabouts. With the decline in volume of the company's business, the amount of routine work in the office became unbearably, demoralizingly light. The map clerks loafed and the bookkeepers joked with one another. Smith found time hanging heavy on his hands; but by Mr. Gunterson's orders he stayed at his desk, although he could have done much, had he been permitted to go out among his agents in the field, to stem the tide.

In the local department the atmosphere was charged with the contagious mourning of Mr. Cuyler, who with funereal face sat contemplating the shrinkage of his business. For with the loss of his branch manager and his two best brokers, there was a deficit in his premium returns which he could not overcome. And certainly his melancholy countenance did not attract business; it was a bold placer indeed who tried with quip and banter to secure Mr. Cuyler's acceptance of a doubtful risk. His world was awry, and all who ran might read it. His brow became unpleasantly corrugated, his smile a thing of the past. If Mr. O'Connor had wanted evidence of the success of his local campaign, he could have gained it from one look at Mr. Cuyler.

Above stairs, however, doom being still a matter of immediate prospect rather than a thing accomplished, Mr. Gunterson still held forth, maintaining a sort of fictitious calm. At times he was even cheerful, and did his best to rally his dazed and despondent subordinates. But Bartels, seeing slip away accounts of agents he had audited for twenty years, was in a state of stubborn, uncompromising rage which closely resembled the dementia of a dumb animal, and Mr. Gunterson could do nothing with him. Still the Vice-President struggled manfully to keep his head above water, to seem cheerful and optimistic. He came from his room one morning, and spoke briskly to Smith.

"I notice that some of your clerks leave their hats around loose instead of hanging them up," he said. "That should not be allowed in a well-conducted office. Please give the necessary orders."

Smith looked at him. This was the closest Mr. Gunterson had come to real contact with the vital problems before him. A company in his charge was disintegrating under his hesitant and futile hand—and he talked about clerks' hats which should properly be hung up!

"Yes, sir," said Smith, quietly. "I'll speak about it."

The weeks followed one another with intolerable slowness. March began, and dragged its weary length along, and still the darkness increased in the Guardian's skies. From Boston the Sternberg, Bloom, and McCoy losses were beginning to come with the frequency and regularity of the shots from a rapid-fire gun. The East was thoroughly disorganized, and even the West, apparently by some subtle psychological influence, was beginning to experience a sympathetic slump. Philadelphia still hung on, the local agents not having been able to agree on any plan of compensation for separating its Conference sheep from their alien goat associates.

Mr. Wintermuth, silent and noncommittal, had returned to the office, but took little part in the conduct of his company's underwriting affairs. And in this manner March wore itself almost out—and it seemed as though the Guardian's span of life were growing rapidly shorter.

On the last day of the month there was a meeting of the directors in the closed room off the President's own. It was a short meeting, and Mr. Wintermuth did the most of the talking, while Mr. Whitehill, who had advocated the election of Mr. Gunterson, had little to say. And so it befell that the directors, after voting him salary in advance for a liberal term, accepted the resignation from the Guardian of Samuel Gunterson; and to fill the vacancy so created, there was unanimously elected to be Vice-President and under-writing manager, Richard Smith.