"Find a cheaper boarding-place. You can get good board for five dollars a week. Your pay is only ten dollars a week to begin, and you must live on that. We'll see that you earn it, too. You can begin printing circulars and cards."
Jack went, and Mr. Gifford added:
"Why, Mr. Jones, he's saved sending for three different workmen since he came in. He'll make a good salesman, too. He's a boy—but he isn't only a boy. I'll keep him."
Jack went to the press as if in a dream.
"A place!" he said to himself. "Well, yes. I've got a place. Good wages, too; but I suppose they won't pay until Saturday night. How am I to keep going until then? I have to pay my bill at the Hotel Dantzic, too—now I've begun on a new week. I'll go without my supper, and buy a sandwich in the morning, and then—I'll get along somehow."
He worked all that afternoon with an uneasy feeling that he was being watched. The paper bags were finished, a fair supply of them; and then the type for the circular needed only a few changes, and he began on that. Each new job made him remember things he had learned in the Standard office, or had gathered from Mr. Black, the wooden foreman of the Eagle. It was just as well, however, that things needed only fixing up and not setting anew, for that might have been a little beyond him. As it was, he overcame all difficulties, besides leaving the press three times to act as salesman.
Gifford & Co. kept open to accommodate customers who purchased goods on their way home; and it was after nearly all other business houses, excepting such as theirs, were closed, that the very tall man leaned in at the door and then came striding down the store to the desk.
"Gifford," he said, "that clerk of yours was right. There's almost a panic in potatoes. I've got five thousand barrels for you, and five thousand for myself, at a dollar and sixty, and the price just jumped. They will bring two dollars. If they do, we'll make two thousand apiece."
"I'm glad you did so well," said Mr. Gifford dryly, "but don't say much to him about it. Let him alone—"
"Well, yes;—but I want to do something for him. Give him this ten dollar bill from me."