V
THE MAN HIGHER UP
The first real blizzard of the winter had burst upon New York from the Atlantic. For seventy-two hours—as Rentland, file clerk in the Broadway offices of the American Commodities Company, saw from the record he was making for President Welter—no ship of any of the dozen expected from foreign ports had been able to make the Company's docks in Brooklyn, or, indeed, had been reported at Sandy Hook. And for the last five days, during which the weather bureau's storm signals had stayed steadily set, no steamer of the six which had finished unloading at the docks the week before had dared to try for the open sea except one, the Elizabethan Age, which had cleared the Narrows on Monday night.
On land the storm was scarcely less disastrous to the business of the great importing company. Since Tuesday morning Rentland's reports of the car and train-load consignments which had left the warehouses daily had been a monotonous page of trains stalled. But until that Friday morning, Welter—the big, bullnecked, thick-lipped master of men and money—had borne all the accumulated trouble of the week with serenity, almost with contempt. Only when the file clerk added to his report the minor item that the 3,000-ton steamer, Elizabethan Age, which had cleared
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