"No," said Larsen, "they not expect me. I didn't like to push this trip. I think we oughta make a list of season stuff and call on regular customers. We could sell them stuff they buy from mail-order folks."
Larsen was determined to find some way of coping with the mail-order houses. We certainly had had some little success, but the mail-order houses seemed always to be everlastingly on the job.
CHAPTER XLI
ENDORSING A NOTE FOR A FRIEND
When I was a boy I had been great chums with a lad named Larry Friday. Larry used to sleep at our house every other night, and I would sleep at his house every other night. We certainly knew each other as well as two boys could.
About six years before I bought this store, he had left town, when his father had moved to Providence. His father had failed there, his mother had died, and Larry, who had always had plenty of spending money, was thrown on his own resources. I had lost track of him, so you can imagine my surprise when he walked into the store one day.
We had a long chat over old times and I took him home for the night. Then he told me that he had saved up a few hundred dollars, and wanted to get another five hundred dollars, for a little while, to enable him to buy a small stationery business in Providence. His father had been in the paper business, and for that reason he naturally leaned toward that line.
"That's too bad, old man," I remarked, when he told me that he was five hundred dollars short. "If I had the money I'd be only too glad to lend it to you," as, indeed, I would have been.
"That's what I came to see you about, partly," he replied, leaning over and becoming very serious. "Now, the present owner of that store is willing to take my note for two months for the five hundred dollars, if I can—find some responsible endorser. Listen, old man,"—and he brought out several sheets of paper all covered with figures. "Let me tell you exactly the condition of the store."
The figures that he had seemed to show conclusively that in sixty days at the most he would have sold enough goods to be able to pay the note.