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standing almost toe to toe while they slugged each other. A veteran of a thousand such locker-room brawls, Westbrook watched them with a feeling of nostalgia. Every blow was intended to cripple. Anything went, except hitting the other man in the face. Boys didn’t fight that way anymore, Westbrook was thinking. They didn’t fight period. They came whining to the management with their disputes: always, as in every difficulty, they wanted someone to do something for them. They were incompetent, indifferent, completely lacking in pride in their work—“too good” to do the job they were paid to do.
    Well…
    Westbrook sighed, shook his head and pulled himself back from the happy past. Then, setting his face in a ferocious scowl, he dashed into the locker-room, managing, by a miracle of foot-work, to give both boys a solid kick before they could elude him.
    “Up!” he roared, pointing dramatically to the ceiling. “Up on the g’damn floor! What’s the matter with you, anyway? You know what time it is? What d’you mean keeping a watch waiting?”
    “Sorry, sir,” said Ed.
    “Sorry, Mr. Westbrook,” said Ted.
    And they edged warily toward the door. Westbrook advanced on them, one hard little fist drawn back.
    “What were you fighting about, huh? Hah? Answer me, you friggers, or I’ll—”
    Ted said they had been fighting about nothing. Ed said they had no excuse. These replies were exactly the right ones, in Westbrook’s opinion. In the old days, boys often fought out of sheer high spirits, and they made no excuses if caught. Nevertheless, as a matter of discipline—and because they expected it—he took a vicious swing at the brothers, cursing them roundly as they fled out the door and up the stairs.
    Now, those were real boys, he thought, as he left the locker-room. You’d never catch boys like that whining or complaining. They knew how to wait on a guest, to get their own way with a man and do it so ingratiatingly that he was glad to pay for the privilege. In the last twenty years, they had worked with Westbrook in perhaps a dozen different hotels. Shrewd and suave, knowing hotels from subbasement to roof garden, they could probably have managed one as well as he. But they remained bellboys by choice. They were good at hopping bells, and it left them free of onerous responsibilities. Also—unless Westbrook missed his guess—they made more money than he did.
    Ordinarily, neither of the brothers would have accepted employment as an elevator operator. One of them had done so in this case because only the night bellboy’s job was open and they insisted on working together. At the time he had hired them, Westbrook had promised to give them day jobs on bells as soon as they became available. But they had later advised him not to bother, that they were completely satisfied with things as they were.
    Westbrook correctly suspected that their preference for the night shift was largely due to the scanty supervision thereon. Certainly they would be able to run circles around that goofy clerk, Leslie Eaton. But no one had caught them in any forbidden activities as yet, and until someone did catch them, or at least came forth with a valid complaint…
    Well, that was that, Westbrook shrugged. They were good boys.
    The dopey dullness of sobriety was creeping back over him. He was passing out on his feet, and there was still that all-important matter of Dudley to settle.
    Westbrook hurried out the back door, fighting to keep the telltale smirk from his face. When he returned, some twenty minutes later, he was once again brisk and alert. And there were two half-pints of whiskey in his pockets, and another half in his stomach.
    He entered the unattended service elevator and switched on the light. He shot upward, the control pushed all the way over, arriving seconds later at the twelfth floor. It was a perfect stop, with the car exactly level with the landing. Westbrook rewarded himself with a couple of “short