CHAPTER THE FOURTH
How I stole the Heaps of Quap from
Mordet Island
§1
"We got to make a fight for it," said my uncle. "We got to face the music!"
I remember that even at the sight of him I had a sense of impending calamity. He sat under the electric light with the shadow of his hair making bars down his face. He looked shrunken and as though his skin had suddenly got loose and yellow. The decorations of the room seemed to have lost freshness, and outside—the blinds were up—there was not so much fog as a dun darkness. One saw the dingy outlines of the chimneys opposite quite distinctly, and then a sky of such a brown as only London can display.
"I saw a placard," I said; "'More Ponderevity.'"
"That's Boom," he said. "Boom and his damned newspapers. He's trying to fight me down. Ever since I offered to buy the Daily Decorator he's been at me. And he thinks consolidating Do Ut cut down the ads. He wants everything, damn him! He's got no sense of dealing. I'd like to bash his face!"
"Well," I said; "what's to be done?"
"Keep going," said my uncle.
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