Part 3

When the erstwhile Dictator first got news of the coming invasion, the crust began to crack slightly around the edges of his aloofness. He commenced saying Good Morning to his Customers and introduced other revolutionary changes in the business.

Also he began a quiet but systematic campaign of subterranean rapping against Young Loch, having scratched up the buried fact that Loch’s grandfather had once swiveled the books when he was County Treasurer.

But Loch was so busy connecting up with desirable Agencies that he paid about as much attention to the Opposition as if it had been located in Portuguese West Africa.

One by one those manufacturers who had been supplying their exceptional wares in driblets to old Punko, decided to give Young Loch exclusive control for the following sound and sufficient reasons, to-wit and as follows: first, because he was willing to place a decent-sized order on Regular Terms with no overhanging strain in way of Special Conditions; and second, because of the reason just stated.

Loch also ran 6-inch dbl. cols. at regular rates in the influential Local Sheet advertising the Lines he carried and received many free cols. in the restricted Reading Pages where he was heralded as a young man of Exceptional Promise, and his project as a Valuable Addition to the Large And Growing Commerce of Our Town.

Young Loch did not ask the manufacturers to contribute anything toward this smashing publicity campaign, except Electros of their thrice-inspected Goods, which they promptly forgot to send, according to custom.

When old Maharaja Magoop saw his Customers dropping off like crumbs when the table-cloth is snapped, he began to get very irritabilious and petulant, and told the Town Folks in a wavering falsetto what he thought of the civic spirit of a community that would desert a Lifelong Taxpayer for some young Upstart who had never helped the Town in any way.

Several people, who could not conveniently pay their accounts at the time because they had told the Ice Man to bring ice every day, were inclined to agree with him right up to the doggone roof; but even these few anti-penults were obliged to patronize Young Loch’s place to a certain extent because The Latter now had the exclusive agency for certain leading Implement Lines formerly held down by The Former, and which required Repair Parts that must fit perfectly, but usually didn’t.

At last it was brought home to the once Mighty Monarch that any Dealer who controlled a well-advertised and popular Line of Goods enjoyed a Valuable Asset and was supposed to move a muscle once in a while in the direction of selling the stuff, and not expect the manufacturer of it to do all the chores.

Into his concrete cone was also drilled the tardy knowledge that a Customer is entitled to some slight measure of Service, and in the sanctified name of Profit should not be regarded in the light of a blaspheming intruder if he fails to wiggle in on an abject stomach and apologize for leaving some of his money in the joint.

In short, old Rigid Neck came to see ultimately that he was in the Discard good and fine. With ever-increasing grouchiness he gradually jelled down in the old sagged Cane Seat where the merry little spiders could spin their silvery webs in peace above his cosmos.

The last heard of him, he had rented out his Store window to an itinerant printer who installed therein a nice little Foot Press and was doing very neat calling-cards for 50c per 100.

As for Young Loch he kept up the Good Work full many a year and came to be most highly respected by his Fellow Citizens, including the President of the Enterprise Real Estate & Investment Company whose budding daughter Loch plucked off the rosebush of Love before his red-eared rivals got within a mile of the garden.

Loch was also beloved by Salesmen everywhere, for he never asked them for an Inside Five, a breakage allowance, or donation of Goods for a Church Fair Raffle.

And he always got through with The Boys in time for them to get away on the Four Forty-Five and see a good Show in the Big Town that night.

_The Lesson for Today:_ He who serves most is the King Pin.

HOT SKETCH NO. 8

THE EFFICIENCY EXPERT

THERE was a Piece of Cheese.

He wore a stand-up collar, broken-lot size, and had a/an Adam’s Apple that used to romp up and down the highway every time he swallowed.

Also he was the busiest bee in the swarm.

After supper each night he had to rush down to the Depot to see that the Railway Boys escorted the 7:12 in and out of the Town all right, and then he’d rush back to the Cigar Store to hear the phonograph play, and lay down a few sound rules on International Relations until the President of the First National Bank came in to buy his after-dinner cigar and it was time to lock up.

After that, he would tear madly over to the Kelly House and there drop a few pearls of wisdom before the Night Clerk while that dignitary was out at the curb cleaning the big tin cuspidors that had served in their day to emphasize many a heated argument between rival groups of local parliamentarians.

Ed Galloway was the name of our genius-in-the-cocoon and wherever Ed was to be found, you knew that something of importance was pending. He seemed to have a gift for being on the spot. If you saw him streaking up Mill Street, you might wonder where he was going, and he might wonder where he was going, but before he got a block away, a barn or something would be sure to catch fire just as he was passing it, or a horse get his hoof caught in the trace, or somebody would be driving a stake just a wee bit off center, and straightaway Ed Galloway would find an avenue for his services or advice. He was present everywhere but Church.

Of course there were certain narrow, quibbling spirits, just as there are in every hamletto, who objected to Ed always chiseling in on everything, but there were not lacking those who, like Jeff Webster, Sole Owner and Proprietor of Webster’s Bus Line, believed that Ed Galloway had pretty near the right hashish on things, nine times out of ten.

Away off somewhere in Thibet or in Sumatra there may have been some petty local question that Ed was not wisdomed-up on, but everything that took on the character of a national or international issue, he could discuss from basement to belfry. He was as much at home in the busy arena of Politics and Business as he was in the wide realm of Science and Philosophy.

There was one thing that Ed had in common with all great political leaders, whether they were fully aware of it or not. It was a positive, ultimatum-like tone in which he rendered his decisions in all cases, regardless of their importance to you, to him and/or to the world at large.

If, for instance, Ed happened to pass a cup of water from the Court House pump to the stranger within the gates, he would say: “That water, Sir, is the purest, freshest water in this here whole State.” He’d say it with a sweep of the arm that seemed to include not only the State but the whole Universe, neither of which territories had he ever canvassed.

And invariably the stranger, after drinking the ordinary every-day water from the ordinary every-day Court House pump, would smack his lips and agree with Ed and have another go at it.

Now everybody in every town of every State of every Nation says the same thing about the water of his particular pump, and there is nothing of news-value either in this observation on our part, or in the statement re pure water on the part of said kanoops the world over.

But whenever Ed Galloway up and said that water was pure, or the Tariff was doomed, or that Stocks would go to a New Low, or that we were going to have rain, you had a sense that here was a man who undoubtedly had a corner on all outstanding knowledge of the subject.

Ed’s words always carried a certain vanadium finality that clinched the case and demoralized rebuttal, but there was always left in the heart of the Vanquished a sort of half-formed desire to call Ed a liar on general principles, although with no hopes of course of proving it; for Ed was always there with The Figures, which he dug up out of the vasty deep of his Imagination to support his side of the case, while his opponent usually was equipped with nothing but a village vocab of short jerky monosyllables and a chew of tobacco.

One day Ed met the owner of the Plow Factory in the barber’s chair getting his chinchillas chipped and told him right off the keyboard that his plant was doing but 8-3/4 percent of the total plow business of the county.

The old wowser gasped like a gaffed sturgeon at this impertinent news and attempted to swing back more or less crushingly, but the lather got in his mixer, and so all he could do was to lie there and let Ed go ahead and throw the short-horn.

Ed proceeded to tell him exactly how many farms there were in the County, State and Nation, the acreage under cultivation, the average number of plows per farm, and so on.

And then Ed wheeled suddenly about, and pointing his finger accusingly at his be-lathered and outstretched victim, exclaimed: “How many of these four thousand three hundred and thirty-two plows did YOU sell in Crooked Creek County last year!”

The old man did not say so, but he as much as admitted that he was a dub at the facts of his own business, and later on when he was putting on his overcoat, and Jake the star wielder of the rasp was helping to pull his undercoat down where it didn’t belong, he turned around pseudo-casually to Ed and told him to drop around to the factory some afternoon and have a chat.

* * * * *

Now it so happened that the Young Man who had charge of the Sales and Advertising end of the Plow Factory was a very faithful and steady Young Man. His conduct was at all times “exemplary,” to coin a word.

Every morning as the Court House clock struck eight, he could be seen dismounting from his tin bicycle at exactly the same spot in front of the office door. He had never been late but one morning in his episcopalean life, and that was after a thick night at the Welfare Social when he went in too strong for the strawberry-whisp.

He was one of those Young Men you can always Rely Upon. You know the kind—always the same. He did the same thing this year that he did last year: (a) and at the same time: (b) and in the same place: (c) and in the same way.

The same Copy that stood in the Ads last year, stood in the Ads this year—and occasionally got tired and sat down in the valuable space.

All his letters to The Trade opened and closed the same way like a door—“Replying to yours” and “Hoping to have.”

He also wrote Weekly Letters to the Men on the Road and talked in the earnest, measured phrases of a requiem, about Punch and Pep and Live Wire. There was almost enough live wire in these salesmanic scintillations to singe the hair off an apple. After you got past the waxed opener beginning with the inevitable “Well Boys,” the stuff went like a warm home-brew.

There was another thing about this Young Man worthy of eulogy. He was one of those Model Employees who always pitch the ball so the Boss can hit it. Whenever the Old Man would ask him a question he would burst a blood-vessel straining to answer it so that it would stack four-square with what the O. M. thought about the matter.

To sum up, this young Sales and Advertising Manager of the hitherto tabulated Plow Factory, was, confidentially speaking, habitually scared to a pea-green that he would offend the Boss and lose his good hundred-dollar job.

* * * * *

That is why he never told Dear Boss about a/an Idea he had perfected for increasing Sales, and never dared slip it into operation on his own account either.

But that night when Ed Galloway met him coming from the Revival and began to ask him all kinds of questions about the factory and the plow business in general, so as to shape himself up strong for his coming interview with the Big Flash, the Young Man unsuspectingly opened up and told Ed all the things he could do for the Works if he were only given half a chance.

The next day Ed, primed like a new pump, blew out to the Factory. When he asked to see the Boss, all the little time-clock punchers in the place began to twitter and twutter. They knew Ed of old and logically concluded he was booking himself for a thorny turn-down. But he wasn’t.

The Boss told Ed to come right in and take a chair. Ed took it and brought it as close to the Boss’s desk as he could without rubbing it against the Old Man’s chest. Then he sat down on it and said he only had a couple of minutes to spare but would like to lay down briefly a plan he had worked out for building Sales.

And with that business-like prelim, Ed proceeded to put into concrete and fearless expression the very Idea that the Model Young Man had confided to him the night before.

The Old Man scowled pleasingly,—a token of endorsement, which, had it been directed to any regular inmate of the place, from the Manager down to the Office Roach, would have emboldened the Trusty to ask for a salary lift. But Ed Galloway preferred to ignore the democratic outburst and continued right on, just as if the Boss had told him to get out.

He adjusted his adams-apple, threw an effective knit-brow, and said that what We must first do was to find out Our strength in the Trade.

“The way to go about it,” he said, “is to first send out a return post-card to every farmer in Crooked Creek County asking him how he likes his Arrow Plow. Farmers are irish-loyal to any farm tool they like—see? They won’t exactly genuflect to it, but they’ll yell and wave and that sort of thing—see? And they love nothing better than to write letters to Firms.

“All right, then: if they are already using an Arrow Plow, they’ll say so all over the return post-card and up the margins. And if they’re using some other make of plow—see?—they’ll be just as proud to tell what plow it is. Get it?”

“Now then,” continued Ed, grabbing a pencil and commencing to figure on the Old Man’s shirt front, “the returns will be 90 percent easy—and from these returns we can get the Arrow’s actual strength as well as the strength of the Competition in the terry-tory, thus enabling us to focus first on the weak spots and then throw our whole force against our competitors’ strong-hold. Get me?”

* * * * *

Now there is no sane reason why this little tale should be dragged out to the length of a Turn Verein entertainment, and so we are not going on to tell you how the Boss got all het up over this and other plans that Ed Galloway got from the Model Young Lobster and then presented to The Boss, nor how Doc Boss finally gave Ed _carte blanche_ and things like that, and told him to go ahead and put the various campaigns through.

Nor are we going to mention the coincidental visit to the Plow Factory of an Advertising man from one of the big national agencies—a dashing, dynamic, daredevil, who would dare anything on somebody else’s money—and who mapped out for Ed Galloway an original and corking national campaign which Ed promptly submitted to The Boss as the child of his own brilliant brain, and which the Agency Man didn’t care a dam about so long as he scythed in his good old fifteen percent agency commission, and which went through with a whoop and proved to be one big snorting, pawing, red-nostriled, fiery success.

Nor are we going into a lot of yawny detail all about how the Factory rose from its musty Rip and became one of the greatest farm machinery organizations in the country and put up a mammoth electric sign so that passengers on the Limited could see “THE HOME OF THE ARROW PLOW,” and almost got news of its erection on the Associated Wire (dam the censors!) and how the Company stood up $500,000 against Andy Carnegie’s $500 for a Library for the Town, and got new engraved letterheads showing a birds-eye of the whole town as the factory with the name of Edward Galloway as General Sales & Advertising Director.

All we are going to mention is that in time Ed put off the straight-stand collar, and put on some flesh over the adams-apple, and quit getting his neck shaved clear around, and began making abstract speeches, (written by somebody else because he was so busy) on “EFFICIENCY” before Ad-Men’s Clubs and Civic Bodies, until at last he stood Big Favorite wherever talk is talked.

Today Edward Ewart Galloway, Efficiency Engineer, sits in his own luxurious suite of solid mahog in New York, surrounded on every side by Brains to which he adds Guts and clears 85 percent net on the combination.

Every little while he gets an emergency call from some big industrial patient who pays him a steel magnate’s salary to come out to their plant and sit around smoking dollar cigars and twisting his moustache and looking wonderfully wise until such time as he can quietly find out what their own Sales Manager’s plans are for the coming season, and then in a Confidential Report to the Board, recommend them as his own good, original, incomparable stuff.

And the moral of it all is this: If you would rise in the Boss’s estimation and in salary, tell him occasionally that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s the only compliment he’ll stand for.

HOT SKETCH NO. 9

THE ROAD RAT WHO GAVE UP HOME COMFORTS

THE Whiffles did not exactly dwell on any Estate sweeping the green hills. They lived, moved and had their boiled cabbage in one of those sedentary little dumps that get their air through the keyhole in winter and smell like a Subway Local on a wet day.

The Whiffles had a son by the name of Ezekiel. On top of it he wore a readymade tie with a corset-stay on the back to keep it from looking human.

Ezekiel’s father had jute whiskers that blossomed from the chin out. He used to sit in the kitchen in his stocking-feet making nothing out of a piece of old wire. This hasn’t anything to do with the story, so we are tabulating it before the action begins.

It was Ezekiel’s daily custom to drop in at the Kelly House to find out if the Four Twenty was on time and thereby live more abundantly.

On this particular day, while Ezekiel was discussing the momentous issue with the diligently idle crowd of local Chair Polishers, he got acquainted with a Travelling Salesman from Whopps Corners, Ind., who always registered from New York City and wore a golden-pheasant vest.

Ezekiel had been reading about the Opportunities that were standing around on the corners of every big city getting bowlegged waiting for competent men to come and get them. So he asked the New York Salesman from Whopps Corners how about it.

The Salesman was modest and retiring, in keeping with the traditions of his profession, and it was therefore under considerable reluctance that he admitted to Ezekiel, with rather long easy puffs of the hessian, that as for himself he was only fetching down about a thousand dollars a month salary, plus a reasonable monthly unearned increment from his Expense Account. In spite of his shyness he seemed to give off the general impression that the Selling Game was one rosy-cheeked cinch.

Ezekiel thereupon decided that of all the fine arts, Salesmanship appeared to offer opportunities of the most scopeful circumference for becoming a millionaire in one reel.

So he went home and changed his socks in a devil-may-care fashion, and started for Chicago that same night, determined to land a job with some big House that travelled snappy men and did not grieve about Expense Accounts.

He was shrewd enough before leaving home to re-inforce his proposition with several strong To-Whom-It-May-Concerns from men of high standing in the community. One was from the Mayor of Squirrel Cove and another was executed by the Proprietor of the Crescent Hand Laundry who up and spoke in no uncertain tone respecting the high esteem in which our fellow townsman, Ezekiel Whiffle, was held by one and all.

* * * * *

Here let it be set down truthfully, with malice toward none, that Ezekiel Whiffle was no speckled yobbish when it came to doing the thing he packed off to do. He had a life-long record of accomplishment as clean as a willow whistle from the day he set out as a youth to shingle the silo, down to the last leg of the last stove he set up at the Hardware Store before his departure.

Thus it did not take Ezekiel one thousand years to land a job in Chicago, although the parking facilities for men less energetic were very tempting in the City of Basement Restaurants.

Within one week of his first lap round the Loop, Ezekiel had secured a comfortable berth as County Hurdler for a large Manufacturing Concern that was struggling to make both ends meet on 142 percent net profit after paying State and Federal squeeze.

Ezekiel’s very earnestness impressed the Boss, even if his Letters of Recommendation did not cause any wild demonstration around the Works. His lack of experience gave him a fresh point of view. He was quite free from the customary we-never-did-it-that-way advice to men who had been running their own business successfully for twenty years.

When the matter of salary was mentioned, Ezekiel had to remove his ear-muffs to be sure he heard the figure correctly. But he decided to go to it anyway and prove that he was worth more than the sixty dollars a month.

During the following fortnight Ezekiel overalled it in the various departments of the big Works getting grease on his face and gathering a rustic headful of practical information which resolved itself finally into a beautifully webbed mass that made the last estate of the poor goop worse than the first.

Zeekie was assigned by the Sales Manager to Luke’s Rock, Iowa, for the initial sales bombardment. The Sales Manager, with his well-set little New England head, had of course never been there himself, just as he had never been any place else, but he talked as though he had been making the dorp for years, and assured Ezekiel that there were wonderful possibilities at Luke’s Rock and said he would be greviously disappointed if Zeke did not pull out of there with fourteen carloads scored up in his Order Book.

“We are expecting big things of you,” he said.

“That’s more than I am expecting of you,” replied Zeke. But he replied it strictly to himself.

Then the S. M. gave Zeke one of those Boston handshakes and a modest bunch of Expense Money and told him to track.

* * * * *

Let us now be seated while we study Human Nature a little, and see if it is not a fact that when you hand a good Job and a bunch of Expense Money to a beadle who has never had either, you are liable to put a crimp in his psychology and enlarge his ego until he can’t find anything to fit it.

Take for illusample: When Ezekiel went from the Office to the Railway Station to catch his train, he felt so goshdanged good that he could have punched a hole through a limousine window for sheer ebullience of spirit.

But when he found that his train was late, he went up to the ticket window and told Mr. Vanderbilt just what he thought of the whole ratty System. And he told it so that everybody around the room could hear it and marvel at his courage and knowledge of railroading. He spoke as in behalf of an injured constituency.

When he boarded his train and got the hang of things, he commanded the porter to raise a window here and lower a shade there, and he ignored the cuspidor entirely every time he took a chew.

When he arrived at his metropolitan destination he gave the owner of the yellow Bus a beautiful bawl for not helping him with his little belly-leather suit-case, and on the way up to the hotel he complained to his fellow passengers about the rickety old boat, and wondered why there were no taxicabs in the dump.