Then, as Nancy opened the door, there was the unavoidable falling in!
“Please!” she begged. But the boys seemed actually massed as for some game.
“Hey there!” urged Ted. “Whoever doesn’t behave can’t get waited on a-tall!”
But his words had no effect upon the eager urchins.
“I want that rod over there!” shouted Rory Jennings. He was tall, big and noisy.
“That’s mine—that beaut in the window,” insisted another. Ted called him Shedder, or something that sounded like that.
“Hey, please, missus please,” begged a lad so freckled Nancy couldn’t see anything else but freckles. “Please missus,” he entreated, “couldn’t you just hand me over that crab net? That’s all I want.”
“Hey there! Stop crowdin’,” ordered a boy who was using all his strength to make matters worse. “She can’t wait on us if you don’t give her a chanst.”
There were easily twenty-five or thirty youngsters in the crowd, and Nancy felt quite helpless to supply all their wants at once. The fact that goods were offered at the very lowest figure possible, that a twenty-five cent ball of fish line was marked ten cents, of course, accounted for the rush. Many boys could get hold of a dime, but a quarter was not so easy to pick up, it seemed.
Then, too, the advertising, one boy telling the other, had done much to make the sale known; hence the early morning rush.