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CLARENCE and Bud lived in the same dotty dorp and went to the same little red-necked school.

Clarence was a studious piece of Rocquefort and scored 100 in everything.

Bud’s monthly report looked like the stock quotations in a demoralized market.

Whenever anything was pulled in the shape of Rough House, Bud was usually the Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Clarence, on yon other hand, always conducted himself in an Exemplary Manner and wore leggins.

There was a big manufacturing plant in the town and when the boys finished school they naturally went to work there. Everybody did. The whole force was born and raised within sound of the whistle.

The Export Manager had never been clear across the County Line. That’s why he was the Export Manager.

Clarence was given an important clerkship in the office.

Bud likewise received Four Dollars a week.

Bud pinched enough postage stamps to make it Four Twenty Five.

Time went on.

And on.

Clarence built up a record for piety, punctuality, faithful fidoism and fussy attention to details that made every aspiring clerk in the place eat the carrot of envy every time they thought of him and his little kuppenheimer.

Bud was the only one who couldn’t see even a dim outline of Clarence’s sterling virtues.

His psychology was as different from Clarence’s “as day is from night,” to put it originally yet cleverly.

Bud was a wrecker of rules and a punisher of precedent.

He couldn’t see where certain non-essential things cut any large and influential ice in the great game of Business.

And he voiced his views with such hobnailed frankness that Clarence daily expected to see Bud popped from the Payroll.

He cautioned Bud repeatedly in a patronizing high tenor to censor his stuff or be prepared for the Hiking Certificate.

Time went on some more.

Bud still stuck.

The predictions of Clarence and all the other starchy little stallers proved to be punk and peanutty.

Comrade Boss seemed to take considerable shine to Bud, but none of the tall-collared gentry could get it at all.

Bud didn’t smoke his cigarettes around in the alley. And he played billiards on the Sabbath. And his business letters lacked dignity they said, although the stuff got over.

The reason the Boss liked Bud can be explained very simply, without the aid of music, motion pictures or other contraptions calculated to emphasize and impress.

The reason was this: Bud had IDEAS.

Now an idea is something that only Individuals are susceptible to. Persons never contract them.

Bud was an Individual. The rest of the Office Staff was an office staff.

If an idea had ever wandered in among them, it would have been unable to establish its identity. Nobody would have known the stranger at all.

Bud didn’t see why things should be done a certain way just because old man Noah did them that way.

Nor why a business letter should throb with about as much human interest as a Report on Weights and Measures, just because it was called a business letter.

Bud was also dead set against office stalling.

He never threw the bluff that he was all fevered up with work when he wasn’t doing anything but tinker with a hangnail.

And when he worked on a job, he worked to produce, not to prolong.

Further, Bud declined to have it in for the Boss simply because he was the Boss. And at every session of the Rappers’ League he was as open about it as a woman with a secret.

All these things Burra Boss quietly eyed-in from time to time, as Bosses have the lowdown habit of doing.

And so one bright Spring Morning about eleven minutes past ten he called Bud into the Throne Room.

“Young man,” quoth he, “you have been for several years sitting in with a bunch of office beadles without becoming one of them.

“It is no simple cinch for a young man to hold himself aloof from the piffle and puff of Office Politics and to evolve ideas in an intellectual graveyard. I take this occasion to congratulate you, my boy.”

“Thank you sir,” quoth Bud, wondering if he was in for something more negotiable than a congratulation.

“And furthermore,” quoth on the Boss, “I have decided to promote you to the sales-managership of this hustling hive at twice the salary we have been smothering you with heretofore.”

Bud attempted to quoth back, but there wasn’t a quoth left in his quothary.

Too full for coherent utterance, he merely made various motions indicating large appreciation, such as bowing, tapping his shirt bosom, winding his watch, and so on.

And then he backed modestly out of the room.

Into the Salesmanager’s sanctum Bud carried the same dashing disregard for precedent and prehistoric policies that had landed him the hundred-and-fifty dollar job.

Inside two more years he had established such a ripping record that the Boss made him General Manager of the Works and raised him to Two Hundred.

The Boss also let Bud in on a percentage of the profits equaling one-sixteenth of one percent beginning with the tenth year after it went into effect.

As for Clarence, he is still sitting neat and erect somewhere in one of the outer offices checking things at a small desk.

In between glances at comrade clock, he wonders how the Boss could have possibly made such a busy blunder as to pop Bud to the top and overlook real genius.

“Mercy!” he ejaculates, and turns once more to his checking.