[XXIII]
Mr. Bill, with Joe Cary at his heels, dashed into the Evergreen and through the crowd of shoppers to the elevator. A car was just about to go up. Mr. Bill reached in and plucked out one of the passengers.
"Larsen," he said breathlessly to the employment manager, "have you taken on any new people to-day?"
"Wha—what?" spluttered Larsen, too startled at being plucked from the ascending elevator to do more than splutter—"what do you mean?"
"Just what I say!" exclaimed Mr. Bill. "Have you taken on any new people to-day? Hurry up the answer! I haven't any time to spare."
His eagerness and his determination impressed Larsen as soon as Larsen could recover from his surprise. "Yes," he said then, "I took on three new people."
Mr. Bill sent a triumphant glance at Joe Cary. "Any girls?" he demanded even more eagerly.
Larsen regarded him curiously. Mr. Bill had never showed any interest in the girls employed in the Evergreen, they had never seemed to be any more to Mr. Bill than so many bolts of midnight blue serge, or so many electric washing-machines, but now Mr. Bill acted as if he knew that the girls were human beings, real flesh-and-blood little creatures. "There was one girl," Larsen remembered slowly.
Mr. Bill caught his shoulder and gave him a little shake. "What was she like? Where is she?" The words fairly dashed over each other in their haste to be spoken. "What was she like?" he repeated impatiently.
"Nothing!" Larsen described the new salesgirl in one vivid word. "She wasn't like anything! And she's down in the basement in the hardware. Her name?" in answer to another shake from Mr. Bill. "Her name was Mary Smith." And to the best of Larsen's recollection she was nineteen years old, a high-school girl, an orphan, and she had wanted to go to work at once. Mr. Walker was short-handed so he had taken her down at once, and she would receive the minimum wage of——