The Acorn Volume Seven CHRISTMAS NUMBER Number Two The Challenge In the past few years the Great West has experienced a wonderful growth. Lumber camps and trading-posts of twenty years ago are now vigorous young cities, boasting of an aggregate population of millions. The growth of the past has been phenomenal, yet the prosperity of the present promises to expand these lively cities into Babylons of wealth and population. In this Western field the two big safe companies, Cooke, Steele & Co. and the International Burglar Proof Safe Co., do a thriving business. In cities of importance where competition is keen each company is struggling to control, each has its eyes upon the future. In 1906 the International Co. sent a young Irishman, Tom O'Leary, to take charge of the richest territory in the North-West. O'Leary is not an uncommon name, but its owner was a very uncommon man. His Irish wit, bouyance of spirit, indefatigable efforts, his earnestness and good common sense made him a valuable appendage to any company. He found the rival firm controlling the field. Their representative was one of the shrewdest salesmen in the West. By systematic and well planned work he had succeeded in sending his company orders for five-sixth of the safes sold in the state the past year. O'Leary was in possession of these facts, and for six months worked while his competitor slept, with the result that Hooke, Steele & Co. awoke one morning to the fact that control had passed out of their hands. They wrote letters spurring their salesmen on; they raised his salary as an encouragement, but still the orders they received became fewer, they were losing thousands of dollars. McGraw, Hooke, Steele & Co.'s salesmen, received, one morning, a lengthy letter from his firm. It contained a statement of the sales made by him during the past few months as compared with the sales of the same months the year before, and closed with these words: "You see the amount of business done by you during the last few months is over a hundred thousand dollars less than the corresponding