There was a meeting of the Merchants' Association that evening—I didn't tell you that I had joined sometime before. As I entered the meeting room, Barlow came to me and told me that Bulder had been to see him, and had told him that I was interested in his proposition but he felt that Barlow would be the better man for them to work with.
Barlow brought the matter of trading stamps up for discussion at the meeting, and it was decided that no member of the association should handle them.
"What would we do if some merchants in the town, who are not members of the association, should take them on?" I asked.
I saw a twinkle in Barlow's eye, for he knew I was thinking of Stigler, who was not a member of the organization.
"I should think," said Wimple, who was the president, "that we had better not try to cross that bridge until we come to it. The leading merchants belong to the association, and I question very much whether the fact that some small store might handle the stamps would have any effect upon us, one way or the other."
I hoped and believed that we had killed trading stamps so far as our town was concerned, but I determined that, if ever the question was to come up again, through some of the others taking up stamps, I would suggest that idea of Fellows', that we form a trading stamp organization of our own, which the association could run. In other words, the Merchants' Association would be the trading stamp concern, and so we would have any benefits coming from it ourselves.
CHAPTER XXIV
PREPARING FOR THE BATTLE
As soon as possible, I visited the landlords of all the empty stores in town, and contracted to rent the windows in seven of them for two weeks beginning the first of October.
Two of the stores I couldn't get because they had been rented for the first of October; one I didn't go to at all because I remembered, fortunately, in time, that the landlord was a friend of Stigler's. If I had told him what I wanted, the probabilities were that Stigler would have got wind of it and he would somehow have got ahead of me.