Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III TANGLED THREADS ' I "HE death of his father hurled Kenneth Gregory into a new world—a world of unfamiliar faces, of strange standards of value, of vastly different problems—the world of business. Kenneth Gregory had taken this world as he found it. There had been no time to moralize upon the situation into which the spinning of the wheel had plunged him. There was work to do. Securing his discharge from the army he had turned to the task of settling up his father's estate. The fact that he was the sole heir and legal executor simplified matters. But there were complications. These he had unraveled with the aid of Farnsworth, the attorney for the estate. Then he had come to Legonia and found plenty to do. Blair, the former manager of the Legonia Fish Cannery, had suffered an attack of pneumonia and was ill at a neighboring sanitarium. From him he could therefore learn nothing. The books of the company told him but little more. Now he was going over the private papers in his father's office. "Are you the boss ?" Kenneth Gregory turned from his perusal of a file of letters and faced a young man standing in the doorway. Gregory nodded. "I'm the owner," he replied pleasantly, noting the well-worn, much-patched service uniform of the stranger. "And for the time being, boss. My manager is sick. Is there anything I can do for you?" "Yes. You can give me a job." Gregory smiled at the frankness of the answer. "I might at that," he said. "Can you speak Russian or Italian?" The ex-soldier shook his head as Gregory went on : "What I need more than anything else just now is an interpreter. I have a lot of foreigners working outside cleaning up. I've been having to make signs to them all morning." The soldier's brow wrinkled. "That's what ...