“Oh, my!” cried the little fellow—“five times twenty-four is, let me see—a naught and two to carry, a dollar and twenty cents. Whoop!”
“Here, here, you don’t suppose we’re going to work all day and all night, too, do you?” said Nelson. “Eight hours will tire you out soon enough.”
“Forty cents a day, then,” cried the little fellow. “Say, I’ll be rich!”
Within the next ten minutes as many as a dozen other boys arrived. The news of Frank Newton having work to be done, had spread like wildfire among juvenile Greenville. All hands begged for employment, but Frank could not hire all of them. He engaged first boys whose families needed help, and promised the others they should work as substitutes when any of the original employes dropped out of the ranks.
“Now then, friends,” said Frank, as soon as the hiring business was disposed of, “Nelson Cady will direct what you are to do. You had better all of you go home first and put on the oldest duds you can find, for this is going to be dirty work. Look here, Nelson.”
Frank had got a big piece of chalk at a carpenter’s shop on his way home from the interview with Mr. Buckner.
With this he now divided the floor space of one whole side of the store into sections about six feet square.
“You see, Nelson,” he said to his superintendent, “first you tip over one of those big packing cases onto the floor.”
“All right, Frank.”
“Then begin picking out an article at a time. Suppose it is a hammer comes first: write with chalk on the edge of a section ‘Hammers,’ and then group all the hammers you find by themselves.”