The others caught the collective pronoun, and began to feel the pleasant sense of ownership that comes with the second bottle and a scheme.
"Our scheme will beat it to death." He lowered his voice and shot a cautious glance at the other tables. "Boys," he whispered, "it's a high-class weekly at a low price!"
He looked from one to the other to note the effect of this startling announcement. It was hardly manifest. The three seemed to be eating more or less industriously and without much care of anything else. They were thinking, however.
"It's a field," observed Perner, at last.
"Barrifield," said Van Dorn, who sometimes made puns.
Barrifield became excited. He did this now and then.
"Field! It's the field," he declared fiercely—"the only field! Everything else is full. There's a ten-cent monthly in every block in New York! And"—whispering hoarsely—"even then they're getting rich! Rich! But there's only one high-class family weekly at less than four dollars in the country, and that's a juvenile! What I propose"—he was talking fast enough now—"is to establish a high-class family weekly—for the whole family—at one dollar a year!"
He paused again. His words had not been without effect this time. The three listeners knew thoroughly the field of periodicals, and that no such paper as he proposed existed. His earnestness and eager whisper carried a certain weight, and then, as I have said before, he was strangely persuasive. Perner, who had once been engaged in business, and had, by some rare fortune, kept out of the bankruptcy court, was first to speak. His "ten years' successful business experience," which he referred to on occasion, gave his opinion value in matters of finance, though at present he was finding it no easy problem to keep up with the taxes on a certain tract of vacant property located rather vaguely somewhere in the Southwest and representing the residue of his commercial triumphs. He was a tall, large-featured man, cleanly shaven, and, like Van Dorn, wore glasses.
"Can you do it, Barry?" he said, looking up with an expression of wise and deep reflection. "Won't it cost you more than that to get up the paper?"
"That," observed Barrifield, calmly, "is the case with every great magazine in the country. The paper and printing cost more than they get for it."