Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories by Rex Beach (ebook smartphone .TXT) 📗

grotesque, as if seen through the spell of absinthe. Yes, it was necessary to check off his figures.

But who could he get to do the work? He could not go to Threadneedle Street. He thought of the Carnegie representative and telephoned him, explaining the situation and his crying need, only to be told that no one in that office was capable of assisting him. He was referred, however, to an English engineer who, it was barely possible, could handle the job. In closing, the Carnegie man voiced a vague warning:

"His name is Dell, and he used to be with one of the Edinburgh concerns, so don't let him know your inside figures. He might spring a leak."

A half-hour later Mitchell, his arms full of blue-prints, was in Mr. Dell's office. But the English engineer hesitated; he was very busy; he had numerous obligations. Mitchell gazed over the threadbare rooms and hastily estimated how much of the nine hundred and twenty dollars would be left after he had paid his hotel bill. What there was to do must be done before the next morning's sun arose.

"This job is worth ten sovereigns to me if it is finished tonight," he declared, briskly.

Mr. Dell hesitated, stumbled, and fell. "Very well. We'll begin at once," said he.

He unrolled the blue-prints, from a drawer he produced a sliding-rule. He slid this rule up; he slid it down; he gazed through his glasses at space; he made microscopic Spencerian figures in neat rows and columns. He seemed to pluck his results from the air with necromantic cunning, and what had taken the young man at his elbow days and nights of cruel effort to accomplish—what had put haggard lines about his mouth and eyes—the engineer accomplished in a few hours by means of that sliding-rule. Meanwhile, with one weary effort of will, his visitor summoned his powers and cross-examined him adroitly. Here was the very man to supply the one missing link in the perfect chain; but Mr. Dell would not talk. He did not like Americans nor American methods, and he made his dislike apparent by sealing his lips. Mitchell played upon his vanity at first, only to find the man wholly lacking in conceit. Changing his method of attack, Mitchell built a fire under Mr. Dell. He grilled everything British, the people, their social customs, their business methods, even English engineers, and he did it in a most annoying manner. Mr. Dell began to perspire. He worked doggedly on for a while, then he arose in defense of his country, whereupon Mitchell artfully shifted his attack to English steel-mills. The other refuted his statements flatly. At length the engineer was goaded to anger, he became disputative, indignant, loquacious.

When Louis Mitchell flung himself into the dark body of his cab, late that evening, and sank his legs knee-deep into those hateful blue-prints, he blessed that engineer, for Dell had told him all he wished to know, all he had tried so vainly to discover through other sources. The average "overhead" in British mills was one hundred and thirty per cent., and Dell knew.

The young man laughed hysterically, triumphantly, but the sound was more like a tearful hiccough. To-morrow at ten-thirty! It was nearly over. He would be ready. As he lolled back inertly upon the cushions he mused dreamily that he had done well. In less than two weeks, in a foreign country, and under strange conditions, without acquaintance or pull or help of any sort, he had learned the names of his competitive firms, the dates of their bids, and the market prices ruling on every piece of steel in the Krugersdorpf job when those bids were figured. He had learned the rules governing English labor unions; he knew all about piece-work and time-work, fixed charges and shop costs, together with the ability of every plant figuring on the Robinson-Ray contract to turn out the work in the necessary time. All this, and more, he had learned legitimately and without cost to his commercial honor. Henceforth that South-African contract depended merely upon his own ability to add, subtract, and multiply correctly. It was his just as surely as two and two make four—for salesmanship is an exact science.

The girl would be very happy, he told himself. He was glad that she could never know the strain it had been.

Again, through the slow, silent hours of that Wednesday night, Mitchell fought the fatigue of death, going over his figures carefully. There were no errors in them.

Dawn was creeping in on him when he added a clean thirty-per-cent. profit for his firm, signed his bid, and prepared for bed. But he found that he could not leave the thing. After he had turned in he became assailed by sudden doubts and fears. What if he had made a mistake after all? What if some link in his chain were faulty? What if some other bidder had made a mistake and underfigured? Such thoughts made him tremble. Now that it was all done, he feared that he had been overconfident, for could it really be possible that the greatest steel contract in years would come to him? He grew dizzy at the picture of what it meant to him and to the girl.

He calmed himself finally and looked straight at the matter, sitting up in bed, his knees drawn up under his chin. While so engaged he caught sight of his drawn face in the mirror opposite and started when he realized how old and heavy with fatigue it was. He determined suddenly to shave that profit to twenty-nine per cent. and make assurance doubly sure, but managed to conquer his momentary panic. Cold reasoning told him that his figures were safe.

Louis Mitchell was the only salesman in Mr. Peebleby's office that morning who did not wear a silk hat, pearl gloves, and spats. In consequence the others ignored him for a time—but only for a time. Once the proposals had been read, an air of impenetrable gloom spread over the room. The seven Scotch, English, and Belgian mourners stared cheerlessly at one another and then with growing curiosity at the young man from overseas who had underbid the lowest of them by six thousand pounds sterling, less than one per cent. After a while they bowed among themselves, mumbled something to Mr. Peebleby, and went softly out in their high hats, their pearl gloves, and their spats—more like pall-bearers now than ever.

"Six hundred and thirty-seven thousand five hundred pounds sterling!" said the Director General. "By Jove, Mitchell, I'm glad!" They shook hands. "I'm really glad."

"That's over three million dollars in real money," said the youth.
"It's quite a tidy little job."

Peebleby laughed. "You've been very decent about it, too. I hope to see something of you in the future. What?"

"You'll see my smoke, that's all."

"You're not going back right away?"

"To-morrow; I've booked my passage and cabled the girl to meet me in
New York."

"My word! A girl! She'll be glad to hear of your success."

"Oh, I've told her already. You see, I knew I'd won."

The Director General of the Robinson-Ray Syndicate stared in open amazement, but Mitchell hitched his chair closer, saying:

"Now let's get at those signatures. I've got to pack."

That night Louis Mitchell slept with fifteen separate contracts under his pillow. He double-locked the door, pulled the dresser in front of it, and left the light burning. At times he awoke with a start and felt for the documents. Toward morning he was seized with a sudden fright, so he got up and read them all over for fear somebody had tampered with them. They were correct, however, whereupon he read them a second time just for pleasure. They were strangely interesting.

On the Deutschland he slept much of the way across, and by the time Liberty Statue loomed up he could dream of other things than blue-prints—of the girl, for instance.

She had enough left from the eighty dollars to bring her to New York and to pay for a week's lodging in West Thirty-fourth Street, though how she managed it Mitchell never knew. She was at the dock, of course. He knew she would be. He expected to see her with her arms outstretched and with the old joyous smile upon her dimpled face, and, therefore, he was sorely disappointed when he came down the gang-plank and she did not appear. He searched high and low until finally he discovered her seated over by the letter "M," where his trunk was waiting inspection. There she was, huddled up on a coil of rope, crying as if her heart would break; her nerve was gone, along with the four twenty-dollar bills; she was afraid to face him, afraid there had been an error in his cablegram.

Not until she lay in his arms at last, sobbing and laughing, her slender body all aquiver, did she believe. Then he allowed her to feel the fifteen contracts inside his coat. Later, when they were in a cab bound for her smelly little boarding-house, he showed them to her. In return she gave him a telegram from his firm—a telegram addressed as follows:

Mr. LOUIS MITCHELL,

General Sales Manager, Comer & Mathison, New York City.

The message read:

That goes. COMER.

Mitchell opened the trap above his head and called up to the driver: "Hey, Cabbie! We've changed our minds. Drive us to the Waldorf—at a gallop."

WITH INTEREST TO DATE

This is the tale of a wrong that rankled and a great revenge. It is not a moral story, nor yet, measured by the modern money code, is it what could be called immoral. It is merely a tale of sharp wits which clashed in pursuit of business, therefore let it be considered unmoral, a word with a wholly different commercial significance.

Time was when wrongs were righted by mace and battle-ax, amid fanfares and shoutings, but we live in a quieter age, an age of repression, wherein the keenest thrust is not delivered with a yell of triumph nor the oldest score settled to the blare of trumpets. No longer do the men of great muscle lord it over the weak and the puny; as a rule they toil and they lift, doing unpleasant, menial duties for hollow-chested, big-domed men with eye-glasses. But among those very spindle-shanked, terra-cotta dwellers who cower at draughts and eat soda mints, the ancient struggle for supremacy wages fiercer than ever. Single combats are fought now as then, and the flavor of victory is quite as sweet to the pallid man back of a roll-top desk as to the swart, bristling baron behind his vizored helmet.

The beginning of this story runs back to the time Henry Hanford went with the General Equipment Company as a young salesman full of hope and enthusiasm and a somewhat exaggerated idea of his own importance. He was selling shears, punches, and other machinery used in the fabrication of structural steel. In the territory assigned to him, the works of the Atlantic Bridge Company stuck up like a sore thumb, for although it employed many men, although its contracts were large and its requirements numerous, the General Equipment Company had never sold it a dollar's worth of anything.

In the course of time Hanford convinced himself that the Atlantic Bridge Company needed more modern machinery, so he laid siege to Jackson Wylie, Sr., its president and practical owner. He spent all of six months in gaining the old man's ear, but when he succeeded he laid himself out to sell his goods. He analyzed the Atlantic Bridge Company's needs in the light of modern milling practice, and demonstrated the saving his equipment would effect. A big order and much prestige were at stake, both of which young Hanford needed badly at the time. He was vastly encouraged, therefore, when the bridge-builder listened attentively to him.

"I dare say we shall have to make a change," Mr. Wylie reluctantly agreed. "I've been bothered to death by machinery salesmen, but you're the first one to really interest me."

Hanford acknowledged the compliment and proceeded further to elaborate upon the superiority of the General Equipment Company's goods over those sold by rival concerns. When he left he felt that he had Mr. Wylie, Sr., "going."

At the office they warned him that he had a hard nut to crack; that Wylie was given to "stringing" salesmen and was a hard man to close with, but Hanford smiled confidently. Granting those facts, they rendered him all the more eager to make this sale; and the bridge company really did need up-to-date machinery.

He instituted an even more vigorous selling campaign, he sent much printed matter to Mr. Wylie, Sr., he wrote him many letters. Being a thoroughgoing young saleman,