“Jack,” he says, “there’s goin’ to be a dozen houses built here all in a bunch, and we got to land the job.”
“Tell me about it,” says Jack.
Catty told him all we had heard, and Jack got quite excited. “I wonder how they’ll let the contract. On bids, probably.”
“With Mr. Gage and Mr. Bockers mixed up in it we won’t have much of a chance,” says Catty.
“That’s right,” says Jack, and he looked discouraged, but Catty spoke right up and says: “We got to have a chance. We got to land that job. There’s big money in it.”
“Pretty big. We ought to make five thousand dollars, anyhow, and maybe more.”
“If they know we’re biddin’ we’ll never land it,” says Catty, “so we got to fool ’em. It’s fair. We’ll do ’em as good a job as anybody if we get a chance, and it hain’t right for them to act like they will toward us.... I guess I got an idee. You’ll have to do it, Jack. We’ll git up a company and call it by a fancy name. It ’ll be a company over to Harleyville. You’ll have to go over there and have letter-heads printed and kind of make believe have an office, and we kin do all the business by mail. Then, when the contracts are all signed up, we’ll be the folks that do the work. How’s that?”
“Bully,” says Jack.
I guess Catty was right about the chance the Atkinses would have had to land the contract, because I heard Mr. Gage and Mr. Bockers talking in Gage’s back yard, and they both said that it didn’t matter what kind of a bid the Atkinses made they wouldn’t let them do the work.
“My wife’s dead set on getting those people out of town,” says Mr. Gage.