No other branch of commerce is as fascinating as the wholesale drug business. A drug stock embraces ten thousand small items, and the remote fastnesses of the earth are raked to supply its necessities. The warehouses are redolent of countless scents that pique a healthy curiosity; poppy and mandragora and all the drowsy sirups of the world are enlisted in its catalogue. How superior to the handling of the grosser commodities of the wholesale grocery line! How infinitely more delightful than distributing clanging hardware or scattering broadcast the unresponsive units of the dry-goods trade!
Such, at least, were Jerry Amidon’s opinions. Jerry knew his way around the store—literally. He could find the asafœtida without sniffing his way to it. He had acquired a working knowledge of the pharmacopœia, and under Eaton’s guidance he purchased a Latin grammar and a dictionary, over which he labored diligently in the midnight hours. His curiosity was insatiable; he wanted to know things!
“Assistant to the President” was the title bestowed upon him by his fellow employees. By imperceptible degrees he had grown into a confidential relationship with Copeland that puzzled the whole establishment. The latest shifts had been unusually productive of friction, and Amidon had found his new position under the credit man wholly uncomfortable. Having asserted his authority, Copeland gave no heed to the results. The credit man was an old employee, very jealous of his prerogatives, and he had told Jerry in blunt terms that he had nothing for him to do. The auditor thereupon pounced upon him and set him to work checking invoices.
Jerry wrote a good hand and proved apt, and as a result of this contact with the office he absorbed a vast amount of information pertaining to the business to which, strictly speaking, he was not entitled. Copeland, seeing him perched on a stool in the counting-room, asked him what he was doing there, and when Jerry replied that he was just helping out for a day or two, Copeland remarked ironically that he guessed he’d better stay there; that he’d been thinking for some time that fresh blood was needed in that department.
No one else entered Copeland’s office with so much assurance. If Jerry hadn’t been so amiable, so willing to help any one who called for his assistance, he would have been cordially hated; but Jerry was a likable fellow. He prided himself on keeping cheerful on blue Mondays when everybody else about the place was in the doldrums.
The auditor sent him to the bank frequently, and he experienced a pleasurable sensation in walking briskly across the lobby of the Western National. He knew many of the clerks he saw immured in the cages; some of them were members of the Little Ripple Club, and he made a point of finding out just what they did, and incidentally the amount of their salaries, which seemed disgracefully inadequate; he was doing quite as well himself. He liked to linger in the bank lobby and talk to people. He had hit on the happy expedient of speaking to men whether he knew them or not; he argued that in time they would ask who he was, which was a surer way of impressing himself upon them than through formal introductions.
Ambition stirred in the bosom of Jeremiah A. Amidon. He lavished his admiration upon the “big” men of the “street”—in the main they were hard workers, and he was pretty well persuaded of the virtue and reward of industry.
Nearly all the leading manufacturers and merchants were stockholders in banks. The fact that Copeland enjoyed no such distinction troubled Jerry. He studied the stock-list, hoping to see something some day that he could buy.
The local stock exchange consisted of three gentlemen calling themselves brokers. Whenever they met by chance on the steps of the Western National or in a trolley going home, the exchange was in session. The “list” must be kept active, and when there were no transfers the brokers could trade a few shares with one another to establish a price. These agitations of the local bourse would be duly reported on the market page of the newspapers—all but the number of shares changing hands! “A better tone prevailing”; “brisk demand for tractions”; “lively trading in industrials” would soberly greet the eye of students of local financial conditions.
Foreman, one of the brokers, who had been haunting the store for several days looking for Copeland, accosted Jerry in the bank one afternoon.