I alighted in Mechanicsville in a state of mind I’ll not attempt to describe. But I looked at myself in a store window and made up a business face to go with my appearance. I hired the best hack in sight, I started on a round of factories, wood merchants, brick-yards, and lumber-dealers. I rode up to the doors of offices in style; I walked in on ’em in style.
It was certainly a new wrinkle in wood-peddling—this plug-hat performance! It opened all doors to me. I don’t know what they thought I was, before I opened my mouth, but I was not kept twiddling my thumbs in anterooms; the main squeeze in every office shunted all else in order to greet me. I wonder what would have been my lot if I had come as a stammering farmer, a crude countryman, or a chopper in wool boots!
I sold wood! By gracious, I did!
I found out something all of a sudden. I discovered that I had the art of salesmanship. It’s an art, a qualification hard to describe. Every man who has ever bought anything knows what it is and how it has operated in his case.
I sold wood and lumber and sleepers—and the more I sold, the higher rose my confidence in my personality, and I had hard work to control and conceal my hysterics of success.
I worked off onto brick-yards even the crooked limbs, the second-grade stuff which I had seen piling up on my operation.
With every buyer I made written contracts, designating prompt delivery on certain dates, first deliveries to be made within a week and calling for cash payments of two-thirds of value of wood delivered, the whole amount to be paid when final delivery was made.
I went on down the line to another city and then to a third. I sold wood! I sold for three days. Then I woke up and stopped selling. It occurred to me that I might be overguessing on the resources of the Kingsley wood-lot.
I had not a mite of trouble in arranging with the division superintendent of the railroad line for a supply of gondola cars; I was offering something worth his attention.
I left that gentleman in mighty abrupt fashion; he must have thought that I was a very precipitate business man. But while I was winding up my arrangements with him, I looked out of his office window in the railroad station into the windows of a train which was pulling slowly out, on its way up-country. I caught a glimpse of a stem profile with a roll of chin-beard under it. If that face did not belong to Zebulon Kingsley—But I did not stop to do any more thinking on the matter. I galloped out of that office. I had to chase that train a hundred yards down the platform—but I made the last car!