"Why?" I replied.
"Well, everybody is talking about your buying up mail-order catalogs."
"I am not buying them up."
"Same thing," he grinned. "You are surely getting a lot of publicity from it, though. Some people think it's a mighty clever trick, others think it's a mean trick, some others think you are scared. Well, they are talking about you, at any rate. Good luck to you! Go carefully, however."
Well, we had mail-order catalogs stacked up in every corner. I arranged with a junkman to buy them at quite a fair price, and, to my utter surprise, I got enough money from the sale of those catalogs to pay for the cost of the machine and a little bit over towards the advertising!
I was mighty glad I had arranged with the furniture store to display the machine, for Martin, the proprietor, said he had crowds of people looking at it. There was a sign on it saying, "This machine will be given free by Dawson Black to the person drawing the winning coupon in the mail-order catalog contest."
Stigler said that the whole thing was illegal, and came under the gambling law, but nothing was done about it, and I knew that, if it was illegal, Stigler would have found some way of getting at me on it.
One thing was sure—the town did not have many mail-order catalogs in it after the contest. I had a big bunch of valuable advertising from it—at least, I thought it was valuable.
For some time Stigler had been telling around town what he was going to do to me. I had heard he had made the remark that he was going to cut the heart out of me, and he surely tried to, for, whenever I had anything in my window or advertised in the papers, he immediately turned around and sold the same article at a lower price. Whenever I had found him doing this, I had immediately cut down below him, and many things I had to sell below cost. But I didn't see any help for it—I couldn't let him get ahead of me on prices like that. I felt that I had to follow his lead wherever he went, and trust to making my profit out of other things. But it surely was heartbreaking to have a fellow like that bucking me.
One day, Rob Sirle, the editor of Hardware Times called on me. He said he had heard about my stunt for beating the mail-order people and he wanted to know about it.