Jim Christmas, who never committed himself orally if he could help it, now chuckled thickly in his throat, and the scarlet network upon his face turned crimson.
“I think, Mr. Wallingford,” said Mr. Squinch, “I think that we will accept your offer of two shares of stock each for our list.”
Mr. Wallingford, having succeeded in giving these gentlemen a grasping personal interest in his profits, diplomatically withheld his smile for a private moment, and, turning over to each of the five gentlemen two shares of his own stock in the company, accepted the list. Afterward, in entering the item in his books, he purchased for the company, from himself, ten shares of stock for one thousand dollars, paying himself the cash, and charged the issue of stock to the expense fund. Then he sat back and waited for the next move.
It could not but strike such closely calculating gentlemen as the new members that here was a concern in which they ought to have more than a paltry two shares each of stock. Each gentleman, exercising his rights as a stock-holder, had insisted on poring carefully over the constitution and by-laws, the charter, the “bonds,” and all the other forms and papers. Each, again in his capacity of stock-holder, had kept careful track of the progress of the business, of the agents that were presently put out, and of the long list of names rapidly piling up in the card-index; and each made hints to J. Rufus about the purchase of additional stock, becoming regretful, however, when they found that the shares were held strictly at par.
In this triumphant period Wallingford was aggravatingly jovial, even exasperating, in the crowing tone he took.
“How are we getting along? Fine!” he declared to each stock-holder in turn. “Inside of six months we’ll have a membership of ten thousand!” And they were forced to believe him.
Probably none of the ex-members of the defunct loan association was so annoyed over the condition of affairs as Ebenezer Squinch, nor so nervously interested.
“I thought you intended to begin collecting your weekly payments when you had two hundred and fifty members,” he protested to Wallingford, “but you have close to five hundred now.”
“That’s just the point,” explained Wallingford. “I’m doing so much better than I thought that I don’t intend to start the collections until I have a full thousand, which will let me have four thousand in the very first loan fund, making two hundred and fifty a week to the expense fund and a hundred a week for the loan committee, besides one thousand dollars toward the grand annual distribution. That will give me twenty-six hundred to be divided in one loan of a thousand, one of five hundred, one of two hundred and fifty, two of a hundred, four of fifty, ten of twenty-five, and twenty of ten dollars each; a grand distribution of thirty-nine loans in all. That keeps it from being a piker bet; and think what the first distribution and every distribution will do toward getting future membership! And they’ll grow larger every month. I don’t think it’ll take me all that six months to get my ten thousand members.”