"But wait!" cried the Russian. "Dere ees a trouble! Your tr-reaty wit' Russia! Have you not a tr-reaty which makes it forbidden to sell to me guns?"
Again that look of patience:
"Yes, General, we have a tr-reaty. But we'll ship your guns as grand pianos to Naples, from there by slow boat down to Brazil and then up to the Baltic, where they'll arrive with their pedigrees lost. Our agent will be there ahead, he'll have found a customhouse man he can fix, he'll cable us where—and when those fifty pianos are landed the said official will open the box marked twenty-two. It'll take him over an hour to do it, the boards will be nailed so cussedly tight. And he'll find a real piano inside. Then he'll look at the other forty-nine crates and say, 'Oh, Hell!' in Russian. Then they'll go on to wherever you want 'em—and you'll revolute. But don't forget that what you need most is the livest press agent you can find. I've got to go now. Think it over. And if you want to do business with me come to my office to-morrow at ten."
The man of business left us. And while the dreamer talked like mad and finally decided that as Mausers were "shoot farther guns" he had better go to Vienna, I watched the twinkle in Dad's gray eyes and thought of the cool contempt in his friend's. And from being amused I became rather sore. For, after all, this little Russian cuss had risked his life for fifteen years and expected to lose it shortly. (As a matter of fact, he was stood up against a wall and shot the following April.) Why make him look so small?
Was there nothing under the heavens that this infernal harbor didn't know all about, and "do business with" so thoroughly that it could always smile?
CHAPTER V
As I drudged on down there in the warehouse, my bitterness became an obsession. I even talked about it to Sue.
"Oh, Billy, you make me tired," she said. "Here I've taken the trouble to bring to the house every magazine writer I know. And they're all ready to help you break in—but you won't write, you won't even try!"
"How do you know I haven't tried?" I retorted hotly. "But I'm working all day as it is—and four nights a week besides. And the other three nights, when I try to think of the kind of thing that I could sell to the magazines—well, I simply can't do it, that's all—it's not my way of writing!"