“When be you goin’ to deliver to them?”
“We’re starting deliveries to-day.”
“Look here, Mr. Heminway. Will you order in cars to put that lumber on for me? I’m goin’ to have it. Will you git ready to load it right off? I’ll pay whatever extry expense there is, or, if I can’t git this lumber, I’ll pay whatever your trouble costs.”
“I’ll do it,” says Mr. Heminway, and his eyes kind of got bright, like he was interested.
“Come on,” says Catty to me. “We’re goin’ to Brown & Bolger’s.”
We got on a street-car and got to the place we were headed for in about twenty minutes. Brown & Bolger’s office was in a little square wooden house built on the corner of a subdivision, and we walked in. Mr. Bolger was there. He was a red man. His hair was red and his face was red and his hands was red, and he had a voice that sounded like he wanted to scare anybody to death even when he was whispering.
He was talking to a couple of men and all three of them were mad.
“We won’t do it, and that’s flat,” says he. “You can all take your tools and go home. We’re paying as high wages to our carpenters as anybody in the country, and we can’t raise another cent. That’s final. We can live without building these houses, and if I didn’t have all that lumber coming to-day, to be paid for within thirty days, I wouldn’t even talk to you. But you think you got us by the short hairs.... I’ll show you. With the costs of building now, there ain’t any money in it, anyhow. That lumber will keep. It won’t spoil.”
The two men turned around and walked out, and Mr. Bolger says to a young man at another desk: “Pretty kettle of fish. I wouldn’t give a hang if it wasn’t for that lumber. But it’s got to be paid for in thirty days, and we can’t borrow on buildings until they’re pretty well along. It’s going to pinch us like the mischief.”
Catty got up and walked over to Mr. Bolger and Mr. Bolger bawled at him, “Well, what do you want around here?”