“Maybe,” says Mark, “we kin do some b-business in dowels, too. We got a dowel-machine that Silas bought because he thought it was pretty, or s-somethin’. Never set it up.”
“When you’re ready, let me know,” says Mr. Rushmore, and he sent for a man to show us through the factory. It was mighty interesting and we found out a lot of things that was valuable to know. After dinner we went to a couple of small turning-mills, about the size of ours, and we got to know quite a lot that was worth money to us. At five o’clock we took the train back to Wicksville, and the first man we saw when we got off the train was Amassa P. Wiggamore, the man that tried to buy our dam.
CHAPTER V
Things sort of pottered along a day or two after we got back. Mostly Mark Tidd was spoiling a lot of paper with figures. I guess he figured in his sleep. He was so full of machine hours and board feet and labor costs and handling costs and such like that he hadn’t room in him for anything else but grub. You couldn’t fill him so full of anything but what he would still have room enough to stow away enough stuff to eat to astonish a hippopotamus.
When he wasn’t figuring he was asking questions, and every time he asked a question he had to figure some more; and then one day he got acquainted with a thing called “overhead expenses.” Well, you never saw such a muss as that kicked up. He said overhead meant the salaries of the superintendents and office force, and insurance, and taxes, and all that; and he said it made him do all his figures over again and add to his costs. I says to the other fellows that if Mark kept on raising his costs the folks that wanted to buy would have to take a balloon to get up to them. But Mark says there was no use selling unless you could sell at a profit. That sounded sensible even to me.
But Silas Doolittle didn’t understand it at all. I guess he figured that any money he got at all was profit. It didn’t matter what a thing cost, when he got real money for it, why, he was that much ahead. But he didn’t try to interfere, which was lucky for him. If anybody goes to interfering with Mark Tidd when Mark thinks he’s doing what he ought to do, then that person wants to go out and get an insurance policy against having something disagreeable and unexpected happen to him.
I asked Mark if he figured lead-pencils and paper in his overhead, because he was using up enough of them to support a couple of good-sized families. He said he was, and he said he was figuring me in as overhead, too. Not that I got a salary, but he let on it was a detriment to the business just to have me hanging around. I don’t think he really meant it, though you can’t ever tell. Maybe I was a detriment, but I was doing the best I knew how.
Saturday morning Mark he come over to me and says, “To-night’s the n-night, Plunk.”
“What night?” says I, because I had forgotten.
“Doll-cab and l-l-lullaby.”