"Shore; and it's a good game too. If you look around you'll find that there is some things that everybody has got to use somehow, somewhere—wood, copper, oil, iron; things like that. You can't build houses and live in 'em unless you have some of them things. Everybody has to buy 'em in wholesale or in retail. I like to buy 'em a little farther back even than wholesale—when they are what you call raw resources.
"If you take things that's made up in packages you can sell them too, a little at a time, but slow. Some folks likes to trade that way; they got to have pictures—objects—right before 'em to believe their money's safe. That's a little slow for me and you, Curly. I like to take the goods before they are put up in packages and buy a lot of them—something that folks has got to have."
"That's where your game is weak, Colonel," says I. "For instance, you deal in cows on the hoof. That ain't respectable. When you cut up cows and hogs into sides, hams and sausage, then's when you get respectable. Ain't you got plenty proof of that? Look at them Wisners, for instance."
He snorts at that and ain't happy.
"Well, it's the truth," says I. "Look at us! We ain't nobody here. Old Man Wisner's the king bee of this here row of houses. We ain't one-two-ten in this race."
"Huh! Is that so? I'm running free, under a pull; and you can't kick. But then, we're having all the fun—not Bonnie Bell."
"I ain't having no fun worth speaking of myself," says I. "But she's doing well enough—she's disgusting healthy—sounder in wind and limb than anybody else in this town. And she's busy too; she's found a new kind of car that she says she's got to have. She says the Wisners bought one a little shinier than hers."
"Well, she can have whatever she wants. We are doing pretty well, seems like. I just went into a little speculation last week that will maybe pay for that new car."
"What's it about this time, Colonel?" I ast him.
"Well, it has something more to do with this here war. Whenever there is a war somebody makes money and everybody loses it. Now you see they're using a awful lot of sharpnel over there—bullets packed up in packages ready to be busted open. It takes a certain kind of lathe to turn them sharpnel, and there is only one kind of lathe in this country that does it faster than any other; and the people that makes sharpnel can't get enough of them. Well, I bought the control of that there lathe. Looking around not long ago, I found a little stove factory down in the sand hills; and I bought it and put a few of them lathes in there and started a little company.