"I'll speak to Ella for you."
The younger man laughed lightly again.
"She's my sister," he said gayly. "I wouldn't lose my sister for anything."
David frowned a little and shook his head to himself, but he said nothing more, though the wish was close to his heart. He thought he was tactful.
"No, I've got that new job," went on young Lamb. "Another man from Boston, too. I'm in charge of the complete office organization of a brand-new manufacturing business that's to start up here. Two hundred dollars a month to begin. How's that?"
"Fine," said David. "Enough to marry on. But it sounds too good. Is he a sharper, too?"
"He don't need to be. He seems to have plenty of money, and the article he's going to start manufacturing is so good that it will pay him better to be honest than to be crooked. I don't see where the man could go wrong. Why, look here!" and from his vest pocket he pulled an orange-headed tack. "Carpet tack—covered with any color you want—same color as your carpet so the tacks don't show—only cost a little bit more than the cheap ones. Don't you think it's a good thing?"
David stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and put on his spectacles to examine the trifle critically.
"Is that all he's going to make—just tacks?"
"Just tacks!" exclaimed the younger man. "Why, Dave, the Eureka Tack Company, that has a practical monopoly now of the tack business in this country, occupies a plant covering twenty acres. It employs thousands of men. It makes sixteen per cent. a year dividends, and has millions of dollars surplus in its treasury—undivided profits! Long freight trains leave its warehouses every day, loaded down with nothing but tacks; and that's all they make—just tacks! Why, think, Dave, of how many millions of tacks are pulled out of carpets and thrown away every spring!"