“You bet,” says I. “How do we stand now?”
“There’s ninety-six d-dollars in the bank,” says he, “that we can figger on for the mortgage.”
“Fine,” says I; “’most a fifth of it.”
“But we’ve had l-luck. There was sellin’ that phonograph. Twenty dollars clear. Don’t happen every day.”
“But our daily sales are keeping up pretty well.”
“If we d-depend on our daily sales to pull us through,” says he, “Jehoshaphat P. Skip ’ll be foreclosin’ his mortgage. We g-got to keep a-thinkin’ up schemes. We got to crowd the business and keep crowdin’ it. Then, if somethin’ we d-don’t foresee now don’t happen, we got a chance. But if somethin’ does happen—” He stopped and shrugged his fat shoulders as much as to say that would be the end of the Bazar.
But I was feeling pretty good. Ninety-six dollars in the bank! That seemed like a lot; and we had put it there ourselves. It seemed to me we were coming along fine.
That night I got a telegram from mother. It says:
Father must have operation. Cost hundred dollars. Can you send money?
I just sat down limp in a chair with all the stiffening gone out of my backbone. There was the extra wallop Mark Tidd was afraid of. I ran right over to his house and showed him the telegram.