“I’ll take a chance,” said Mr. Merrill.
Mr. Wallingford, with rare wisdom, promptly stopped argument and produced a beautifully printed “bond” from his pocket, which he made out in Mr. Merrill’s name.
“I might add,” said J. Rufus, after having taken another careful inspection of Mr. Merrill, “that you win the first prize, payable in the shape of food and drink. I’d like to have you take dinner with me at the hotel this evening.”
Mr. Merrill, from force of habit, looked at his watch, then looked at Mr. Wallingford speculatively.
“Don’t mind if I do,” said he, quite well satisfied that the dinner would be pleasant.
In his own carpenter-shop Wallingford found Mr. Albert Wright at a foot-power circular-saw, with his hair and his eyebrows and his mustache full of the same fine, white wood dust that covered his overalls and jumper; and up over the saw, against the wall, was tacked the time-yellowed placard of a long-since-eaten strawberry festival. With his eyes and his mind upon this placard, Mr. Wallingford explained his new boon to humanity: the great opportunity for a four-year loan, without interest or security, of from ten dollars to five thousand.
“But this is nothing more nor less than a lottery, under another name,” objected Mr. Wright, poising an accusing finger, his eyes, too, unconsciously straying to the strawberry festival placard.
“Not a bit of it,” denied Wallingford, shocked beyond measure. “It is merely a mutual benefit association, where a large number of people pool their small sums of money to make successive large ones. For instance, suppose that a hundred of you should band together to put in one dollar a week, the entire hundred dollars to go to a different member each week? Each one would be merely saving up a hundred dollars, but, in place of every one of the entire hundred of you having to wait a hundred weeks to save his hundred dollars, one of you would be saving it in one week, while the longest man in would only have to pay the hundred weeks. It is merely a device, Mr. Wright, for concentrating the savings of a large number of people.”
Mr. Wright was forcibly impressed with Wallingford’s illustration, but, being a very bright man, he put that waving, argumentative finger immediately upon a flaw.
“Half of that hundred people would not stay through to the end, and somebody would get left,” he objected, well pleased with himself.