“I’ll bet you a thousand dollars—” began Carmichael hotly, when Jim waved him down.
“Not with me,” said Jim. “Your friend, Mr. Bonner, there, knows what chance there is for you to bet even a thousand cents with me. Besides, we know our facts, in this school. We’ve been working on them for a long time.”
“Bet your life we have!” interpolated Newton Bronson.
“Before we finish,” said Jim, “I want to thank you gentlemen for bringing in Mr. Carmichael. We have been reading up on the literature of the creamery promoter, and it is a very fine thing to have one in the flesh with whom to—to—demonstrate, if Mr. Carmichael will allow me to say so.”
Carmichael looked at Bonner, made an expressive motion with his head toward the door, and turned as if to leave.
“Well,” said he, “I can do plenty of business with men. If you men want to make the deal I offer you, and I can show you from the statistics I’ve got at the hotel that it’s a special deal just to get started in this part of the state, and carries a thousand dollars of cut in price to you. Let’s leave these children and this he school-ma’am and get something done.”
“I can’t allow you to depart,” said Jim more gently than before, “without thanking you for the very excellent talk you gave us on the advantage of the cooperative creamery over the centralizer. We in this school believe in the cooperative creamery, and if we can get rid of you, Mr. Carmichael, without buying your equipment, I think your work here may be productive of good.”
“He’s off three or four points on the average overrun in the Wisconsin co-ops,” said Newton.
“And we thought,” said Mary Smith, “that we’d need more cows than he said to keep up a creamery of our own.”
“Oh,” replied Jim, “but we mustn’t expect Mr. Carmichael to know the subject as well as we do, children. He makes a practise of talking mostly to people who know nothing about it—and he talks very well. All in favor of thanking Mr. Carmichael please say ‘Aye.’”