"Next morning, when I reached Beatrice, the first thing I saw in the old hotel (I still recall that dead, musty smell) was a church directory hanging on the wall. In the center of the directory were printed these words:
"'A Sabbath well spent brings a week of content
And plenty of health for the morrow;
But a Sabbath profaned, no matter what gained,
Is a certain forerunner of sorrow.'
"Down in the corner, where the glass was broken, one of the boys who had without doubt profaned the Sabbath, had written these words:
"'A man who's thrifty on Sunday's worth fifty
Of a half-sanctimonious duck;
He will get along well if he does go to dwell
Where he'll chew on Old Satan's hot chuck.'
"My business the week before had been simply out of sight. The old man in the house wrote me the only congratulatory letter I ever got from him in my life. He was so well pleased with what I had done that he didn't kick very hard even on the bill that I had slashed. But that next week—oh, my! I didn't sell enough to buy honeysuckles for a humming bird. I began to think that maybe that Sunday bill had 'queered' me."
"But how about Sunday now, Bill?" spoke up one of the boys. "Do you think you'd like to take a good fat order to-morrow?"
"Yes, I've grown not to mind it out in this country," said Billy. "You know we've a saying out here that the Lord has never come west of Cheyenne."
"I shall never forget my first experience," said my old friend Jim, as we all lighted fresh cigars—having forgotten the Dutch pictures and the black oak furnishings.
"I had made a little flyer for the house to pick up a bill of opening stock out in Iowa. They all thought in the office that the bill wasn't worth going after, so they sent me; but I landed a twenty-five hundred dollar order without slashing an item, a thing no other salesman up to that time had ever done, so the old man called me in the office and gave me a job just as soon as I came back.
"I started out with two hundred dollars expense money. The roll of greenbacks the cashier handed me looked as big as a bale of hay. I made a couple of towns the first two days and did business in both of them, keeping up the old lick of not cutting a price.