I put in another hard think and then I got it. The way to make that $31.25 a real present was to make it a payment on something and then with the other hand pass out a job at the same time, which would not alone keep the soldier but allow him to cover the difference.
And to get away with this all I needed now was a popular investment and 320 perfectly good steady jobs.
Well, with the Victory Loan the first part was easy enough, and I concluded to pay twenty-five dollars on each of three hundred and twenty one hundred dollar victory notes, making myself responsible for the lot the same as if I was a bank and getting a job for each note and having the giver of the job hold the note on the soldier and pay me the instalments and I would pay myself back, or if not nobody would be stung outside of me, supposing any one of them failed to come across. I was going to take a big lot for myself and another ten didn't much matter.
And then with the remaining $6.25 each, well, I would pool that for leaflets enough to go around the whole division and on the leaflet I would have printed the facts and a list of the jobs and just what they was, with how much kale per week went with them, and see that the boys got them while the parade was forming and then it would be up to them, because the home folks can only do so much and then it's up to the army their own selves just as with munitions and sugar and red X work while the big show was on. They did the work but we gave them the job—we and the Germans. And now all we could do again was to give them a job—and it's enough, judging from how they went after the first one.
And then, just as I come smack up against the awful fact of where would I get them jobs Ma come in and says the hot-dogs and liberty-cabbage which it's the truth we always translate them into American at our table, was getting cold and as long as I was paying for them I'd better eat them while they was fit. So I says all right and we went in and did so.
Believe you me, it certainly is a remarkable thing the way you start on a afternoon's work like I done, all full of vigor and strength and how your ideas and courage and everything will sort of leak away toward the time to put on the feed-bag at Evensong. And how again the ideas and pep comes back in the evening once you have eaten. There was almost perfect silence the first few minutes we sat down or would of been except for Ma taking her tea out of the saucer, which I can't learn her not to do and the only way I keep her from disgracing me at the Ritz and etc., is to make sure she don't order it. But when the first pangs was attended to I commenced to feel more conversational.
"Work," I says, thinking of what I had been thinking of. "Work is the one thing that stands by a person. Everything else in life can go bluey and their work will see them through. That's why it's been so popular all these years, and where these Bolsheviks make their big mistake. Because they don't work and not working they get bored to death and so they commence rioting. Do you remember that quotation from that well-known cowboy poet, Omaha Kiyim, "Satan will find business still for idle hands to do?" How good that applies to strikes—idle hands—ain't that perfect? And it written so long ago!"
"How long?" says Ma.
"Oh, I dunno. Maybe three hundred years," I says.