I understood that Stigler was mad because I had opened up in the carpenter tool line so much more than my predecessor had.
Jock had told me that I ought to reduce my stock and increase my sales. I had increased my sales, but increased my stock also. Still, I had saved quite a lot in price by buying in large quantities, and, if the worst came to the worst, I could pay everybody but the Boston jobbers.
Bates & Hotchkin, to whom I owed nearly $2,000.00, had been very decent to me. They had sent their man to help me take stock and never charged me a cent. I had given them the bulk of my general business, and they had looked after me in great shape. I felt that they would give me an extra thirty-days credit if I asked for it, and I certainly would sooner ask them than any one else.
I studied the figures that evening until Betty came in and put her dear hands on my forehead and said, "How hot your head is, boy dear—are you worrying over anything in particular?" "No," I said with a smile. "Well," she replied, "it is 12:30 and quite time you were getting some beauty sleep."
I said I was not worried, but I didn't like the size of my liabilities. I began to think I had been a fool in buying so heavily.
The next morning I had a bit of excitement, with the result that I paid Myricks his money and let him go.
I had decided to adhere to the division of expenses that Jock had worked out, and that meant reducing the force. Accordingly, I had told Myricks that he could stay a few weeks until he got another job, and I meant it, but that morning, when I caught him in the basement tossing lamp chimneys into the fixtures so carelessly that a number of them were broken, I got mad and told him he was an ungrateful scamp, and that I thought he was deliberately destroying my property. He turned around and said I had no cause to say he was a crook, and that, even if I was his boss, he had friends who would help him to protect his reputation!
Then I saw red, and plugged him under the jaw! Next I called him upstairs, gave him a week's money, and let him go.
His parting remark was, "Everybody's getting wise to you; I'm glad to be through before the smash comes. Mr. Stigler told me what would happen and I can get a job there now—and I'm going to him right away!"
It didn't scare me any—it merely aroused my fighting blood. There was one good lesson I learned that day, though, and that was, "Never to talk to an employee while in a temper." I felt that I had lowered my dignity by so doing; and, even though I had done him no harm, I certainly had not done myself any good.