"Why, yes," I says. "Don't you?"
"No!" he sings out, so loud that 'Dolph Cahoon, our new clerk, who'd been half asleep in the lee of the gingham and calico dressgoods counter, jumped up and stepped on the store cat. The cat beat for port down the back stairs, whoopin' comments, and 'Dolph begun measurin' calico as if he was wound up for eight days.
"No!" says Jacobs again, soon as the cat's opinion of 'Dolph had faded away into the cellar—"No!" he says. "I don't think it at all. We may not sell Eureka Adjustables to that hotel, but we'll sell screens to it—and don't you forget that. I'll make it my business to get that contract if I don't do anything else. I'm no quitter, if you are!"
"Nary quit!" says I. "I'll stand by to pull whatever rope I can; but it does seem to me that this agent, whoever he is, will have an eye on that hotel. And, accordin' to your accounts, he's got better goods than we have."
"Maybe. But if he's a better salesman than I am he'll have to go some to prove it. I'll beat him, by fair means or foul, just to get even. That's a promise, Skipper, and I call you to witness it."
"Wonder who this Geo. Lentz is," says I. "'Tain't a Cape name, that's sure."
"I don't care who he is. I only wish he'd have the nerve to come into this store—that's all. He'd go out on the fly—I tell you that! And that's another promise."
Maybe 'twas; but, if so—However, I'm a little mite ahead of myself; fust come fust served, as the youngest boy said when the father undertook to thrash the whole family. The fust thing that happened after our talk and the Eureka folks' letter was Jim Henry's goin' over to West Ostable to see Parkinson, the hotel man. He went in the new runabout automobile that he'd bought since he got back from the West, and was gone pretty nigh all day. When he got back he was hopeful—I could see that.
"Well," says he, "I've laid the cornerstone. I've talked the Nonesuch"—that was the brand of screen we carried—"to beat the cars; and we'll have a show to get in a bid, at any rate. It'll be six weeks more afore the contract's given out, and meantime yours truly will be on the job. If our old college chum, G. Lentz, Esquire, don't hustle he'll be left at the post."
"What sort of a chap is this Parkinson man?" I asked.