“One day my little bell tinkled, and I got up and went into the old man’s office. He was smoking a cigar and trying to look through a two-foot wall into Herb Williams’s pickle factory. Pretty soon he swung his one good eye around on me and looked at me sharp. ‘Hen,’ he said, ‘we’re in a fix. We haven’t paid but two hundred thousand on the P.G.—and what’s more, that’s all we can pay.’
“‘Well, sir,’ said I, ‘what’s the trouble?’ It’s funny—he’s always called me Hen, and I’ve always called him sir and Mister MacBayne. He ain’t anybody to-day, but if I went back to Pittsburg to-morrow and met him in Morrison’s place, he’d say, ‘Well, Hen, how’re you making it?’ and I’d say, ‘Pretty well, Mister MacBayne.’—Ain’t it funny? Can’t break away from it.
“I’ve just had a wire from Black,’ said he,—Black was our attorney up at Buffalo,—‘saying that the sheriff of Erie County,’ over the line in New York State, ‘has attached all our gondola cars up there, and won’t release ’em until we pay up. What’ll we do?’
“‘Hum!’ said I. ‘We’ve got just a hundred and twenty gondolas in Buffalo to-day.’ A hundred and twenty cars was a lot to us, you understand—just like it would be to the S. & W. Imagine what would happen to you fellows out here if Peet had that many cars taken away from him. So I thought a minute, and then I said, ‘Has the sheriff chained ’em to the track, Mister MacBayne?’
“‘I don’t know about that,’ said he.
“‘Well,’ said I, ‘don’t you think it would be a good plan to find that out first thing?’
“He looked at me sharp, then he sort o’ grinned. ‘What’re you thinking about, Hen?’ he asked.
“I didn’t answer direct. ‘You find that out,’ I told him, ‘and let me know what he says.’
“About an hour later the bell tinkle-winkled again. ‘No,’ he said, when I went in his office, ‘they ain’t chained down—not yet, anyway. Now, what’ll we do?’