Take men and horses, by and large, and they run pretty much the same. There’s nothing like trying a man in harness a while before you bind yourself to travel very far with him.
I remember giving a nice-looking, clean-shaven fellow a job on the billing-desk, just on his looks, but he turned out such a poor hand at figures that I had to fire him at the end of a week. It seemed that the morning he struck me for the place he had pawned his razor for fifteen cents in order to get a shave. Naturally, if I had known that in the first place I wouldn’t have hired him as a human arithmetic.
Another time I had a collector that I set a heap of store by. Always handled himself just right when he talked to you and kept himself looking right up to the mark. His salary wasn’t very big, but he had such a persuasive way that he seemed to get a dollar and a half’s worth of value out of every dollar that he earned. Never crowded the fashions and never gave ’em any slack. If sashes were the thing with summer shirts, why Charlie had a sash, you bet, and when tight trousers were the nobby trick in pants, Charlie wore his double reefed. Take him fore and aft, Charlie looked all right and talked all right—always careful, always considerate, always polite.
One noon, after he had been with me for a year or two, I met him coming in from his route looking glum; so I handed him fifty dollars as a little sweetener. I never saw a fifty cheer a man up like that one did Charlie, and he thanked me just right—didn’t stutter and didn’t slop over. I earmarked Charlie for a raise and a better job right there.
Just after that I got mixed up with some work in my private office and I didn’t look around again till on toward closing time. Then, right outside my door I met the office manager, and he looked mighty glum, too.
“I was just going to knock on your door,” said he.
“Well?” I asked.
“Charlie Chasenberry is eight hundred dollars short in his collections.”
“Um—m,” I said, without blinking, but I had a gone feeling just the same.
“I had a plain-clothes man here to arrest him this evening, but he didn’t come in.”