The Big Squeeze

Pete Quint’s a fast-thinking, chain-lightning supersalesman, but I still claim it was the liar with the one gall us who gave us our opportunity — or perhaps it was opportunity that gave us the liar.

Pete says it’s only once in a hundred years that opportunity really knocks. Most of the time she’s hiding under the bed, or standing right behind you when you’re beefing about how bad business is.

He says a good salesman never waits for opportunity to knock, anyway, but goes out ringing doorbells. That way he calls on her before she’s ready to start out on her own round of door-knocking.

Pete and I are partners. Right now we’re in Los Angeles looking for lines. We already represent a tire company and a milk-bottle concern, but Pete isn’t satisfied. He wants to be a full-fledged manufacturers’ agent. So we’ve hired salesmen to do the leg work, and the overhead’s eating us up. Good lines are as hard to find as gold mines.

We’re at breakfast. Pete’s reading the distinguished-guest list at the hotels. He says lots of times a man can get a good lead that way.

All of a sudden his eyes get bright. “Look, Ed; L. F. Doolittle, vice-president of the Puckley Air-Conditioner Company, has been at the Rose Bowl Hotel for the past three days.”

“What’s that to us?” I ask.

Pete says, “Buckley’s a good outfit. Their business has been growing. They have a coast distributor. Now, why should Doolittle have been here three days? I’ll bet their coast distributor’s got more territory than he can handle.”

“Probably just a trip of inspection.”

“Not if he’s been here three days.” Pete shoves his hand down in his pocket, pulls out his change and picks out a nickel. He says, “The only man who can’t win is the one who doesn’t play,” and heads for the phone booth. I know it’s just another nickel wasted. Doolittle won’t even listen. But you can’t argue with Pete. And while I’m sitting there alone, the waitress brings the check.

Doolittle’s chins hang over his collar, but he has keen eyes, a catfish mouth and close-clipped speech. “Do you,” he asks, “know anything about the desert?”

Pete sucks in a quick breath. “We know all about the desert, Mr. Doolittle.”

Doolittle scratches his head. “I like your style,” he admits. “Your record is impressive, taking what you say at its face value. Our distributor here has too much territory. He can’t possibly cover the desert, and the Refrigerheat Air-Conditioning Company is beating our time. Their outfit won’t do what they claim, but they’re cleaning up. We need desert representation, and need it badly. If I only knew a little more about you—”

Pete never believes in a canned approach, but he has half a dozen different stock lines all his own. Now he interrupts with his showdown clincher line, “Mr. Doolittle, what’s the use of talking? No matter what I tell you, it’s still just talk. You want orders. We want commissions. Give us a territory on trial. If within thirty days we don’t develop three times as much business as you think the territory is capable of producing, we don’t want your line.”

Doolittle reaches in his brief case, takes out a map, says, “Brother, you asked for this, and it’s going to be tough.” He starts filling out a contract.

After we sign up, Doolittle gives us a complete demonstration, loads us down with literature, gives us the low-down on competitive products, and is getting ready to take us over to his distributor’s to coach us on installation when the phone rings.

He answers, says, “Very well, send her up,” and turns to us. “This may be embarrassing. A Miss Bernice Johnson wrote she has connections in Sandyville, which is now in your territory, and thinks she could sell several units. Naturally, we couldn’t give a distributor’s contract to a young woman with no previous experience. However—”

“Sure,” Pete interrupts, “we’ll talk to her.”

Bernice Johnson is a trim little package with long-radius curves. She’s too game to let us see any disappointment as Doolittle tells her about our contract. He introduces us, and Pete goes to work.

“Miss Johnson,” he says, “if you have any leads in Sandyville, we’ll make the sales and pay you a commission.”

She says no. She has connections, but she’s going to sell units on which she can get a full distributor’s contract. She starts for the door.

Pete sits her down at the desk and says, “You’ll want your friends in Sandyville to buy the best. It would cheapen you if you sold them an inferior product. Now, if you’ll give me five minutes, I’ll show you—”

It doesn’t surprise me, because I know Pete, but Doolittle stands back with his jaw propped up by the knot in his necktie, watching Pete do his stuff.

By the time Pete’s finished, she’s given him everything, including a letter to her father, Ole Johnson. He owns the Banner mine, which is Sandyville’s best bet. Although there are some neighboring mines, Johnson keeps a hundred men employed, and the picture show, pool hall, hotel and saloon will all be influenced by Ole. If he says, “Puckley air conditioners,” that’s what it’ll be.

It’s morning on the desert. The long mountain shadows are still purple valleys. Big saguaros push grotesque arms into nightmare silhouettes. Smoke trees look like balls of mist hanging in the still air, ready to float away on the first breeze.

The old gas hog is doing her stuff, and as nearly as I can tell from the road map, it’ll be ten o’clock when we get to Sandyville. Bernice Johnson has told us to start in on a man by the name of Grandis, who owns the movie theater.

“Why’s Miss Johnson so anxious for commissions if her dad owns a gold mine?” I ask Pete.

He says, “Ole Johnson is a plunger. He’s thrown every cent he could scrape together into buildings and machinery — borrowed up to the hilt. There’s a younger sister in college. Bernice thinks there should be some family eggs that aren’t all in one basket. She wants to start a business of her own.”

I’m thinking that over as we speed up to a chap in faded blue overalls that are held up by one suspender. He’s walking east, and the way his feet move up and down, I know he’s accustomed to covering long stretches by leg power.

I tell Pete, “Let’s give the optimist a lift.”

“What makes you think he’s an optimist?”

“The lone suspender.”

We pick him up, and he turns out to be the best catch-as-catch-can liar in seven counties. He’s about fifty-eight, with desert-bleached eyes and a walrus mustache. He’s going as far as Westland, and he tells his lies in a slow drawl, as though he didn’t particularly care whether we believed him or not.

His name is Lingar, and he starts the ball rolling by telling how smart his burros are. He says they watch the flour sack, and when it gets almost empty they know it’s time to go to town, so they hide out in the brush. Then Lingar has to waste a lot of time finding them. “But I got ’em fooled,” he goes on in that slow drawl. “I got a sack an’ padded it with excelsior. When the flour begins to run low, I stuff that dummy in the flour sack, and the burros think I’m all provisioned up. They stick right around camp, and ’tain’t no trouble at all to catch ’em. Heh-heh-heh!”

Pete gives me a quick glance. Any new sales trick interests him, and I can see the idea of using a slow drawl when you’re putting over a fast one is something he’s going to remember.

“Get hot around here?” I ask, just making conversation.

Lingar says, “Well, now, wait a minute, boys, I won’t say definitely about right here,” and he looks around as though trying to get his exact latitude and longitude. “I’m a truthful man, and I ain’t a-goin’ to say anything that ain’t so. Right here, boys, I ain’t spent a summer, so I don’t know.”

“Where do you spend your summers?”

“Westland, about thirty-five miles from here. Now, it gets real hot in Westland. I know that for a fact.” He turns to us with slow solemnity and lets us look into his guileless, faded eyes.

“How hot’s it get?” I ask.

“Well, now, stranger, we don’t go much for puttin’ out thermometers in this country. But I do know what the Westland Hotel used to do. They used to make a specialty of servin’ baked potatoes, and those potatoes never even seen an oven. They just planted ’em out in the sun, and when a guest would order baked potato, the waitress would run out, scrape away the ground, jab a fork in a potato, bring it in, cut it open, put on a slice of butter and some paprika, and that’s all there was to it. The hotel used to be famous for its fine baked potatoes.”

“You say it used to be famous?” I ask. “Doesn’t it serve ’em now?”

“Well, no, it doesn’t,” Lingar says in a mournful voice. “We had one awful hot day here last summer, and one of the guests burnt his mouth pretty bad. He sued the hotel. Sure was hot that day. The cook told me that if a man ordered a three-minute egg, he didn’t dare to leave it in the water over a minute and a half.”

“Because the water got so much hotter?” I ask, winking at Pete.

He doesn’t walk into that one. He regards me reproachfully. “Water,” he says, “only gets so hot. After it begins boiling, it can’t get no hotter.”

“What about the eggs, then?”

“Why,” he explains, “they started cookin’ the minute the cook opened the door of the icebox. Now, don’t think I’m tryin’ to tell you that was our regular summer weather. That really was unusual. You know how those desert lizards are? They re awful fast. Well, sir, for a week after that hot spell you could walk out and catch a lizard anywhere.”

“Why was that?”

“Their feet was blistered. Poor little cusses!”

We look at each other and laugh, and Lingar retires into a hurt, dignified silence. Just before we get to Westland, he says, “An’ I suppose you won’t believe me if I tell you about my cabin.”

“What about it?”

“My cabin,” he says, “has been in almost every state in the Union. One night there was a big storm, and my old cabin blew away. I didn’t know what I was goin’ to do. Then, all of a sudden, I heard a big commotion an’ this cabin was delivered F. O. B. on my claim without no hosses or no trucks an’ just when I needed it.”

“Sure,” Pete says, “we believe you,” and winks at me.

Lingar clams up again, but the joke’s on us when we get to his house. He’s living in an old boxcar which had been dumped on his property in a train wreck. The railroad company figured it wasn’t worth moving off.

Pete puts out his hand. “That,” he concedes, “is a horse on us.”

Lingar shakes hands and says self-righteously, “I told you I was a truthful man. I never say nothin’ I ain’t verified.”

We drive on to Sandyville. People are huddled in little knots on the street. Gloom hangs over the place as though it had been snowing black crape. We find Grandis in the combination poolroom and bar.

He’s a thin chap with a mosquito nose and greedy eyes. Pete sizes him up for the fast approach. “Mr. Grandis,” he says, as soon as we’ve ordered three glasses, “we’re representing the Puckley air conditioner. Instead of trying to lure patrons into your theater with bank nights and dishes, why not put in one of our outfits? Then you’d have to give the customers a set of dishes to get ’em out.”

Grandis has a thin, tight mouth that hardly moves when he talks. He opens his lips just enough to let out one word at a time.

He says, “I don’t give away dishes. I don’t have bank nights. I’ve got the only picture show within eighty miles. My customers take what I give ’em, and like it. Ninety per cent don’t even stop to look on the billboard at what’s playing. They buy tickets and walk in. I don’t need no air conditioning. People here take their climate the way they find it.”

Pete smiles and says, “And our local agent is going to be Miss Bernice Johnson.”

Grandis looks at Pete. “Twenty-four hours ago that would have meant something. Now it don’t. The vein pinched out in the Banner mine last week. They tried to keep it quiet, but this morning their engineers threw up the sponge. The mine’s finished. The—”

A tall, gaunt man with blond hair and sober blue eyes comes in the door. Grandis scrapes back his chair and makes a beeline for this newcomer.

The bartender wipes off the table and says, “Don’t wait, boys. He won’t be back. He’s trying to get that big Swede to sign an option. You boys were trying to sell him something, weren’t you?”

Pete nods. “Air-conditioning unit for the theater.”

The bartender says, “You’re wasting your breath. This is going to be a ghost town within thirty days. That’s Ole Johnson he’s talking with now.”

Grandis takes Johnson’s arm in a firm grip and steers him out the door. I pick up my glass and look across the rim at Pete. We keep waiting for Grandis to come back, but the bartender was right. After a while, Pete tips me the wink and orders another. When the bartender comes over, Pete turns loose the old Quint personality, and the bartender loosens up. Johnson’s broke. The town is broke, but the biggest sucker of all is Grandis. Property is selling for a song, and Grandis is singing the song. What he can’t buy, he ties up on sixty-day options.

After the bartender leaves, I tell Pete we’d better start back to Los Angeles.

“Don’t be silly! Bernice really needs her commissions now. We can’t let her down.”

So Pete’s fallen hard and is making a hopeless fight for the girl’s commissions. Meantime, our own overhead is ticking on like a clock. We start for the hotel. Halfway there, Pete looks around, and says in a low voice, “Surprise, surprise! Don’t look now. Santa Claus is coming!”

We slow down, and I hear hurrying steps, then Grandis says in his thin, rasping voice, “I didn’t mean to run out on you boys. I saw a man who—”

Pete grabs Grandis by the hand, and gives him the pep approach. “Mr. Grandis, I congratulate you on your business acumen. Communities such as this don’t go back. They go forward. You’ve had the vision to see further ahead than most of these people. Now, has it ever occurred to you that the adjustment period before the new capital takes over the Banner mine will an ideal time to install a Puckley conditioning unit in your theater? In that way you’ll be ready to take care of the new crowds and—”

“You goin’ to the hotel?” Grandis asks.

“Yes.”

“I’m going that way myself. I’d like facts and figures. And I want to know how your outfit is better than your competitors.”

Pete says, “I suppose you’re referring to the Refrigerheat air-conditioning outfit. Mr. Grandis, it isn’t the policy of our factory to knock competitors. Salesmen are specifically instructed on that point. But that rule applies only when we’re dealing with the average customer. When we deal with a man of your unusual intelligence, we answer all questions fully and fairly. What did you want to know about Refrigerheat?”

I’ll say one thing for Pete — he can absorb facts, figures and performance records faster than anyone I ever saw. Listening to him talk, you’d think he was an air-conditioning engineer. He’s remembered all of the patter Doolittle handed out, all of the stuff the Las Angeles distributor told him, and added some dope he got from reading the instructions sent out by the factory.

Grandis soaks it up. Occasionally he nods his head as though he’s all ready to give the order. But at the last minute he decides he’ll think it over. Pete can’t quite get his name on the dotted line.

“Pete,” I say, after Grandis leaves, “I smell something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. It’s just a faint odor.”

Pete puckers his lips and says, “Ed, you may be right, but we’re going to sell him sooner or later, one way or another.”

“What makes you think so?” I ask dubiously.

Pete’s answer is simple. “He listens, doesn’t he?”

Next day the big news breaks. Sandyville gets the Los Angeles papers about ten o’clock, and it’s spread all over the front page. The Scarborough Engineering & Experimental Company has taken over a big contract for the manufacture of a new explosive. The company has been searching for some isolated place where it can manufacture the explosive and carry out tests. The company was in a quandary until an alert speculator sold it the idea of moving into a ghost town — a mining community out in the desert where the vein had pinched out. Here was a city made to order, with residences for the workmen, a big mill which could be converted into a factory for the explosives, picture show, pool hall, stores, and millions of desert acres where the company could conduct its experiments.

The newspaper doesn’t mention the name of the town or the name of the shrewd speculator. It doesn’t need to.

Pete looks across at me and says, “Crazy like a fox, eh?”

We hear, later on, that Scarborough is in town. It doesn’t take long to locate him. Pete barges up with all the Quint personality flowing along behind his outstretched hand.

“Mr. Scarborough, I’m Pete Quint, of the Puckley Air-Conditioner Company. We’re here to make your workingmen comfortable and—”

Scarborough beats him to it. “I wired Mr. Grandis yesterday,” he says, “telling him we would have labor trouble unless we air-conditioned the factory. I don’t suppose these houses” — indicating the miners’ unpainted shacks with galvanized-iron roofs — “can be conditioned. But, if possible, I want to do something. See Grandis, Tell him I sent you.”

“We’ve already seen him,” Pete says.

Scarborough smiles. “That’s good. I wired him about air conditioning yesterday.”

Pete shakes hands again and starts with me toward the telegraph office. On the way he says, “That’s what accounted for Grandis’ change in attitude. The wire was delivered to him after he left the poolroom.”

“Elementary, my dear Watson, but why didn’t he give us the order?”

Pete laughs. “The order is in the bag.”

He sends Bernice Johnson a wire:

We start hack to the hotel. Everybody on the main street is cussing Grandis. He pulled out around midnight for Los Angeles. Probably he knew the story was going to break. There’s just one question you hear everywhere on the street: “Signed up with Grandis yet?” The answer always starts with a nod of the head. After that, the boys really warm up.

When we get back to the hotel, the proprietor says, “You’ll have to vacate your rooms tonight. Mr. Scarborough’s party have reserved every room.”

He’s so smug about it I can’t resist asking, “Signed up with Grandis yet?”

He turns away, looking sick. We go to our room and start packing. Pete is jubilant. “Good old Lady Luck sure gave us the breaks on that air conditioning. I tell you, Ed, she’s with us a hundred per cent. That’s the way with the dame. Sometimes when a fellow gets to taking too much for granted, she’ll go A. W. O. L. for a while. It’s just a test. She’s always watching, and if you take it on the chin, stay in there and pitch, she comes back with a smile and says, ‘Why, hello! There you are! I lost you in the crowd and have been looking for you ever since.’ ”

And Pete picks up one of the hotel’s straight-hacked chairs, dusts it off, and says, “Here you are. Lady Luck. Since you’re going to be with us, you may as well be comfortable. Take this seat by the window. You’ll find it’s cooler here.”

That’s Pete. When things are going good, he’s kidding the Dame along, putting out chairs for Lady Luck to sit in, and talking to her as though she’s there in the room.

“We haven’t got the order yet,” I tell him.

Pete says, “You don’t think he listened to all that engineering data on changes in temperature and humidity per cubic foot per minute just because he liked the sound of my voice, do you?”

“No,” I admit. “He was interested, but... well, there’s something queer about that fish, Pete.”

“Forget it,” he tells me, and makes a bow to the chair he’s placed for Lady Luck. “You’ll have to excuse my pessimistic partner. Some mornings he has a grouch, but—”

There’s a knock on the door. It’s the manager. “Telegram,” he says.

Pete takes it, walks over to the chair by the window. “I’ll open it where you can look at it,” he says to Lady Luck. “Thus telegram is from Mr. Grandis ordering Puckley air-conditioning units.”

“Perhaps,” I interrupt, “Lady Luck is as curious about what’s actually in that telegram as I am.”

Pete says, “It’s a cinch. I can read it by mental telepathy.” He closes his eyes and presses the envelope against his forehead. “Mr. Grandis,” he says, “wants to buy—”

I jerk the envelope out of his hand and tear it open.

The message is from Bernice Johnson, and reads:

I pick up the telephone. “If our bill’s ready,” I tell the manager, “we’ll check out now. We won’t be back.”

Back in Los Angeles, we take Bernice to dinner. She’s a little soldier, but it’s harder for her than for us. She tries to keep cheerful, but she’s blue.

On our way back to her apartment, we’re coming to a railroad crossing when the red signal starts wigwagging.

Pete says, “The way Lady Luck’s giving us the go-by, this’ll be a freight train a mile long.”

He’s right. It’s a procession of fruit express cars, crawling past the crossing.

“Those cars certainly do rattle,” Bernice says. “Some of them look awfully old. What do they do when they finally—”

Pete says, “They have a car graveyard. They—” He stops talking as my hand digs into his shoulder.

“Remember Lingar,” I say.

Pete’s eyes are blinking rapidly, the way they do when he’s thinking fast. “We’ll need Bernice to help make up our first sample. Let’s make it a three-way partnership. Shall we, Ed?”

I nod.

Pete grabs her hand and mine. “You’ll have to get Lingar, Ed,” he says, talking five hundred words a minute, “and let him circulate with the incoming workmen. Bernice and I will keep on the job at this end — and every second’s going to count.”

Bernice smiles. “I guess it’s going to be swell, but I’d like to know what it is.”

Lingar surveys me with a tired air of detached indifference. “You mean I get money for doin’ nothin’ except lyin’?”

“That’s right. Not too big lies. Don’t put it on so thick they don’t sound plausible.”

He says, “You come and offer me ten bucks a day for tellin’ the same sort of lies I’ve been tellin’ for nothin’. When I work, I never get more than three bucks a day, and that’s workin’ in a mine with pick and shovel. Shucks, partner, you’re the one that’s puttin’ it on so thick it don’t sound plausible.”

I drive Lingar down to Sandyville and turn him loose. Workers are starting to arrive, hanging around the pool hall, looking the city over.

Lingar does his work well. Passing by the pool hall that night, I hear his slow drawl, and look inside. A group of men are listening, spellbound.

“Well, gentlemen, this here spy was usin’ invisible ink. You had to put a hot iron on it to make the writin’ visible. When this Government man came into his room in the hotel, he carelessly slid a cigarette case over the letter. But he hadn’t figured on our desert summers. When he put that cigarette case over it, it was just like puttin’ on a hot iron. The Government man picked it up; there underneath was plans for the whole gol-derned bombin’ sight.”

Pete and Bernice are working against time back in Los Angeles. I keep in touch with them by telephone. On Thursday, Pete says they’ll be ready to shoot on Saturday, but I hear Grandis and Scarborough are signing up on Friday night at the poolroom. So it has to be Friday or never. Pete says he’ll make it somehow, and to get as big a crowd as possible hanging around the poolroom.

I don’t need to get the crowd. Lingar’s good for that.

Grandis has been keeping pretty well out of sight. Now he comes over to me in front of the whole crowd. Words slip from his mouth like wet watermelon seeds being pushed out one at a time. “Just because we’re competitors, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be friends.” He sticks out his right hand.

I get my fingers wrapped around it. “No hard feelings at all,” I say, grinning and squeezing. “Everything’s fair in war and business, eh?”

He retrieves what’s left of his hand and stands looking down at it. “Eh?” he says. “Yes. Oh, yes.” He’s not going to be signing anything with that hand — not for a few minutes at least.

Scarborough comes bustling in, carrying a brief case. Every neck cranes as he walks over to a table. He’s the town’s big shot.

“All ready, Grandis?” he asks.

And just then I hear the rumble of a truck coming up the street. Someone yells, “Here’s a house on a truck!”

Everyone piles out of the poolroom.

Pete’s up on the seat with the driver, looking as though Lady Luck was sitting at his side, giving him her best smile. If you’re in on the secret, you can see that originally the house had been a condemned refrigerated fruit car. But they’ve put in a door, windows, cute little striped awnings, a peaked, shingled roof, and given it a coat of bright green paint. Even I have to look twice and then rub my eyes.

Scarborough stands for a minute, fascinated, then pushes his way through the gawking bystanders. “What have you here?” he asks Pete.

It’s Bernice Johnson who answers the question. She opens the door and stands on the threshold in a neat house dress and white apron, sheer silk stockings peeping beneath the swing skirt.

She says, “We have here the first unit of the Quint-Felton-Johnson Desert House, equipped with insulated walls, packed with four inches of ground cork, soundproof, windproof, weatherproof, bugproof. My father still has six hundred acres of level land. We’re going to put these houses on it. Every unit is equipped with Puckley air conditioners. No matter how hot it gets outside, the inside’s cool and comfortable. A workman coming home in the evening finds an appetizing meal served by a wife whose nerves aren’t frayed by heat, finds a place to stretch out. Wouldn’t you boys like to come in?”

Would they! There’s a rush that makes the truck sway on its springs. Men crowd around the door, peer in the windows, set foot on the threshold — and stop.

Bernice has done it. The idea was ours, but it took a woman to put it into execution. And it’s that feminine touch that makes the thing go across.

There’s an electric refrigerator, a gas range, a table all set with tablecloth, napkins and silverware. There are bright-colored linoleum rugs in the kitchen, and a thick Axminster rug in the living room. There are reading lights, pictures on the walls, neat wallpaper, drapes on the windows, and the crowning touch of all, what Pete says afterward is the best job of silent salesmanship that was ever pulled, a big easy chair with a radio beside it, a footstool, a pair of slippers on the floor, and a newspaper open at the sporting section. On the little smoking stand is a humidor, a brier pipe stained a rich brown, and a basket filled with matches.

The interior is filled with a restful coolness which comes as a relief after the glare of a blazing desert sun. Scarborough moves forward, and we all draw back from the door so he can go in. Pete follows him.

“What are you going to do with this?” Scarborough asks.

Pete says in a loud voice, “Sell two hundred of them to you. This is the first unit of a mass-production desert palace. The houses in this town are wooden shacks with tin roofs. In summer they’re regular ovens. Workingmen can’t live in such conditions. You’re going to work three shifts. Think of a man on the night shift coming home in the morning to one of those iron-roofed, bake-oven shacks, fighting off flies and—”

“How much,” Scarborough interrupts, “and how soon?”

Pete says, “Believe it or not, we get these cars cheap. Originally, they cost plenty. The insulation has packed just enough so they can’t be used any longer for shipping fruit. But it hasn’t hurt them a bit for insulated houses. They’re cool in summer, warm in winter. They’re so weatherproof you can air-condition them for a few cents a day. You can start your factory and your experiments, and we’ll deliver these at the rate of twenty a week, every one air-conditioned with a Puckley.”

Pete opens a drawer in the table and pulls out a contract.

“Just a minute!” Grandis yells, pushing forward.

He’s a little guy, and I’m blocking the doorway. “Okay, boys,” I say. “Let’s get out and let ’em talk.” I put my heel down hard on Grandis’ instep. A moment later I hear the door slam behind me.

The bunch climbs down off the truck. Pete has it all fixed with the driver. The gears mesh, and the truck, with Bernice, Scarborough and Pete in the house, starts moving away fast.

“Hey, wait!” Grandis yells, and runs limping after the truck, choking on the dust, losing ground at every jump, the men jeering at him.

Ole Johnson is standing near me. “Looks like the dame is smiling on us,” I tell him.

“Vot you mean, ay dame? My Bernice she ain’t bane no dame. She—”

“Lady Luck,” I tell him. “She’s the dame who’s smiling. Your daughter has a third interest in this. She’ll net ten thousand bucks. Grandis is stuck with his old shacks.”

Behind me I hear a slow, drawling voice say, “Reminds me of the time up in the Geronimo Mountains when I saw an old she-grizzly chase a prospector. He got jammed between two saplings. Well, gentlemen, that bear flung her paws around the saplings and the man all together and started to squeeze. There was enough spring in the saplings so she couldn’t crush the man, and she couldn’t break the saplings. She’d squeeze for a while and then let go to get another grip. Then she’d squeeze again, and she kept it up until she got plumb tuckered out. But she wouldn’t give up. She just kept on squeezin’ until she fell over dead.”

The old liar hitched up his one gallus and looks at me with an expression that says he ain’t charging for that one. He’s just throwing it in with the pride of performance of an artist putting on a final touch.

“That’s the way with Grandis,” he says. “He’s plumb squeezed himself to death!”