When Sam received this letter, it surprised him, and I am not quite sure whether he was entirely pleased with his friend’s good fortune.
“Well, that beats all!” he exclaimed, “that such a greenhorn as Joshua Drummond should get a situation in Chicago within a week; at twelve dollars a week, too! Why, he don’t know a cane from a broomstick, and yet he gets half as much again as I do. Chicago must be a good place to go. If such a greenhorn can get twelve dollars, I ought to get eighteen or twenty. I wonder whether it would pay me to go out there.”
It will be seen that Sam had no suspicion of the falseness of Joshua’s statements. In fact, he did not give him credit for the ability to deceive him. He really thought, therefore, that Joshua obtained the sum he claimed. Still he had prudence enough not to give up a certainty for an uncertainty, and contented himself with writing Joshua to look round, and, if he saw an opening for a clerk with several years’ experience, to let him know.
“I would be willing to come for my present salary--twenty dollars a week,” he wrote. “My present employer is willing I should go away until I am twenty-one, when I will come back, and go into partnership with him. He thinks it will be of advantage to me to become acquainted with Western trade. Besides, I should like to be with you. We might room together, you know.”
This was adroitly written, so that Joshua need not doubt the truth of representations he had made in New York. They answered the purpose. So the two were mutually deceived by the representations of the other.
It made Joshua feel rather important to have Sam apply to him for a situation, and he at once wrote back, saying that he would let him know at once if he heard of any vacancy. “But I am afraid,” he added, “that we can’t room together. The fact is, I and Mr. Remington room together, and he would be disappointed to have me leave him. But you might get a room in the same house. They change eight dollars a week board; it is nicer than your boarding place in New York, though that will do very well.”
“That Remington must be a fool!” thought Sam. “He seems perfectly taken up with Joshua, and I am sure he’s about as stupid a fellow as I ever set eyes on.”
You see Sam and Joshua were intimate friends, and intimate friends are very apt to notice each other’s faults, and to judge them most severely, are they not? What is the use of having friends if you can’t abuse them?
So the result was that Sam, toiling in an obscure Eighth avenue store for eight dollars a week, felt very much wronged to think that Joshua had at one bound stepped into a more desirable situation than himself. If he could only have known the real state of the case, and how much Joshua had exaggerated the advantages of his position, he would have been very much comforted. If he had been a disinterested friend he would have rejoiced at the good fortune of Joshua; but then he was not disinterested.