“By the way,” said Mr Shanklin, presently, “Moses and I have got a little Company on hand just now, Durfy. What do you think of that?”
“A company?” said Mr Durfy; “I’ll wager it’s not a limited one, if you’re at the bottom of it! What’s your little game now?”
“It’s a little idea of Alf’s,” said Mr Medlock, whose Christian name was Moses, “and it ought to come off too. This is something the way of it. Suppose you were a young greenhorn, Durfy—which I’m afraid you aren’t—and saw an advertisement in the Rocket saying you could make two hundred and fifty pounds a year easy without interfering with your business, eh? what would you do?”
“If I was a greenhorn,” said Durfy, “I’d answer the advertisement and enclose a stamped envelope for a reply.”
“To be sure you would! And the reply would be, we’d like to have a look at you, and if you looked as green as we took you for, we’d ask for a deposit, and then allow you to sell wines and cigars and that sort of fancy goods to your friends. You’d sell a dozen of port at sixty shillings, do you see? half the cash down and half on delivery. We’d send your friend a dozen at twelve and six, and if he didn’t shell out the other thirty bob on delivery, we’d still have the thirty bob he paid down to cover our loss. Do you twig?”
Durfy laughed. “Do you dream all these things,” he said, “or how do you ever think of them?”
“Genius, my boy; genius,” said Mr Medlock. “Of course,” he added, “it couldn’t run for long, but we might give it a turn for a month or two.”
“The worst of it is,” put in Mr Shanklin, “it’s a ticklish sort of business that some people are uncommon sharp at smelling out; one has to be very careful. There’s the advertisement, for instance. You’ll have to smuggle it into the Rocket, my boy. It wouldn’t do for the governors to see it; they’d be up to it. But they’d never see it after it was in, and the Rocket’s just the paper for us.”
“I’ll try and manage that,” said Durfy. “You give it me, and I’ll stick it in with a batch of others somehow.”
“Alf thinks we’d better do the thing from Liverpool,” continued Mr Medlock, “and all we want is a good secretary—a nice, green, innocent, stupid, honest young fellow—that’s what we want. If we could pick up one of that sort, there’s no doubt of the thing working.”