“Freight. There's nothing for a broker in a passenger vessel. I'm scouting for two boats for the Mannheim people. You've heard of them, of course. They own tremendous copper mines in Alaska, but they can't seem to get the right kind of flux to smelt their ore up there; so they're going to freight it down to their smelter in Tacoma.”
“I see. But how do you work the game to pay your office rent?”
“Why, that's very simple, Mr. Peasley. Their traffic manager merely calls me up and tells me to find two ore freighters for him. He doesn't know where to look for them, but he knows I do, and that it will not cost him anything to engage me to find them for him. Well, I locate the vessels and when I come to terms with the owners, and those terms are satisfactory to my clients, I close the charter and the vessel owners pay me a commission of two and a half per cent. on all the freight money earned under the charter. A shipowner generally is glad to pay a broker a commission for digging him up business for his ships—particularly when freights are dull.”
Matt Peasley nodded his comprehension and did some quick mental arithmetic.
“Why, you'll make a nice little fee on those ore boats,” he said. “I suppose it's a time charter.”
“Four years,” Mr. Hayes replied, and smiled fatly at the thought of his income. “Of course I'd make a larger commission if the freight rate was figured on a tonnage basis; but on long charters, like these I mention, the ships are rented at a flat rate a day or month. Say, for instance, I negotiate these charters at the rate of four hundred dollars a day, or eight hundred dollars a day for the two boats. Two and a half per cent. of eight hundred dollars is twenty dollars a day, which I will earn as commission every day for the next four years that the vessels are not in dry dock or laid up for repairs.”
“And you probably will earn that by one day of labor,” Matt Peasley murmured admiringly—“perhaps one hour of actual labor!”
Mr. Hayes smiled again his fat smile. He shrugged.
“That's business,” he said carelessly. “An ounce of promotion is worth a ton of horse power.”
“Well, I should say so, Mr. Hayes! But you'll have quite a search to find an ore boat on the Pacific Coast. There are some coal boats running to Coos Bay, but they're hardly big enough; and then I suppose they're kept pretty busy in the coal trade, aren't they? It seems to me that what you need for your business would be two of those big steel ore vessels, with their engines astern—the kind they use on the Great Lakes.”