THE ARK FINDS A NEW HOME
Jimmy had predicted a busy week, and Jimmy was right. Things began to
hum on Monday. Telephone and electric light connections were ordered, a
visit was made to the printer and a card written to be inserted three
times a week in the _News-Patriot_. All these things Jimmy engineered
with his partners’ assistance between four-thirty and six o’clock. On
Tuesday the car-barn was ready for occupancy, and, although their lease
did not begin until the first of the month, they were at liberty to
move in whenever they wished, and they “wished right away,” as Tom put
it. So Tuesday afternoon, when The Ark had delivered its last passenger
from the 1:57 and 2:06 trains, it was driven to Oak Street, and, with
a loud tooting of the horn, rolled through the first of the two wide
doors into the garage. It was quite a triumphal entry and the boys
regretted that Jimmy was not there to witness it. The pit was a thing
of the past, its former location indicated by a six-foot wide strip
of new planking that gleamed across the floor like a path of sunlight.
The old ties which had littered a corner were piled in the yard at one
side, the owners being glad enough to escape the labor of carting them
away.
The keeping of the old ties and the truck which had run across the
pit exhibited a trait in Jimmy which the boys soon discovered to be
at once amusing and canny. Jimmy never let anything get away from him
if there was space to store it, and ultimately, perhaps to-morrow or
perhaps two years hence, he found a use for it. Thus, the old ties were
eventually utilized in many ways; cut into short lengths, they became
blocks to hold up front or rear axles when wheels had been removed;
split and chopped into kindlings they started the fires in the small
forge which Jimmy set up in the back yard the following spring. As for
the four-wheeled truck, it soon became one of the handiest features of
the garage. The flanged wheels were taken off and small wheels with
wide, flat treads were substituted. The two lengths of rail on top were
removed and a platform was built. Then they had a truck that could be
pushed easily about the floor and that would hold almost any weight
that could be placed upon it. Tom called it “Jimmy’s tender.” The rails
pulled up from the floor and left to rust outside the barn eventually
formed the framework of an improvised crane by which the body of an
automobile under repair could be lifted from the chassis, or, for that
matter, by which the whole car could be slung off the floor. Jimmy even
hoarded away the old spikes that had held the rails in place, and the
boys declared laughingly that he could take one of those spikes, heat
it in the forge, hammer it on the anvil and fashion it on the lathe
into anything from a rivet to a driving rod!
Later that Tuesday afternoon Jimmy appeared with a bag of tools and
set to work moving the bench from the back wall to a location under
the side windows. After that he hammered and sawed about in the little
box-like enclosure that was to serve as the office and soon had a
sloping shelf erected for a desk and a row of narrow shelves above it
to hold books and paper and such things. He came back after supper
that evening and worked until late by the light of a kerosene lantern,
while Tom and Willard alternately lent a hand or sat on the truck in
the flickering shadows and looked on admiringly. The telephone was put
in Wednesday morning and the electric light connections were made that
afternoon. Meanwhile a sign-painter, a personal friend of Jimmy’s, was
covering ten square feet of the side of the building toward Main Street
with a huge sign in black letters on a white ground which read:
CITY GARAGE
AUTOMOBILES STORED AND REPAIRED
GASOLINE――OILS――TIRES――SUPPLIES
OFFICE OF THE CITY TRANSFER AND
GARAGE COMPANY
Later a similar inscription appeared on the front of the building, and
one by one brightly colored signs of wood or metal began to flaunt
themselves, advertising the merit of Somebody’s Motor Oils or Somebody
Else’s Tires. But that was a good deal later. Almost every day now
Jimmy announced or exhibited the purchase of some necessary tool or
implement, and the prices at which he obtained things――many of them
second-hand but in good condition――amazed his partners. If Jimmy wanted
a certain kind of wrench he knew just where to go and bargain for it
and ultimately get it at his own price. Meanwhile the mail delivered
all sorts of letters and circulars to the firm. It was remarkable how
quickly news of the formation of the new concern reached the dealers
in automobile supplies. And it seemed still more remarkable how eager
those same dealers were to do business. In the evenings the three
members of the firm sat in the little office――they had only to turn a
switch now to flood the place with light――and discussed the brands of
oils or greases or tires to be handled by them.
“These Wells-Knight people offer a whole lot bigger discount than the
Octagon folks,” Willard would say. “Couldn’t we make more if we handled
their goods, Jimmy?”
“We’ll take some of their stuff,” Jimmy would reply, “but the Octagon
factory makes better tires, Will. It doesn’t pay to make too much
profit on a thing because it’s a fair bet the thing isn’t really good,
and we don’t want to sell a poor tire to a man and lose his trade when
we can sell him a good tire and have him come back again. Same way with
oils and greases and soaps. There are fifty firms putting those things
on the market, I guess, and it would take Solomon to know which ones
are the best, but at least we can steer away from those we know to be
too cheap to be good. I guess, take it by and large, we’d better deal
with the Red A folks on oils. They don’t offer as big a discount as a
lot of others, but everyone knows their goods; they’ve been making them
for six years or so, and that means something.”
By the end of that week salesmen were popping in on them at all hours,
salesmen with everything from a new kind of tire-pump to turn-tables
and gasoline tanks. One man even wanted to take their order for a
vacuum cleaner. He told them they would find it extremely handy for
getting the dust out of automobile upholstery. They were offered the
local agency for all sorts of things from spark-plugs to wind-shields.
And the offers didn’t stop at wind-shields, either, for there came
a letter one day that caused Jimmy to snap his fingers triumphantly
and exclaim: “Jumping Jupiter, fellows, why didn’t I think of that
myself?” The letter proved to be from a well-known firm of automobile
manufacturers in the middle West and it offered them the Audelsville
agency for their cars. When the boys learned of the commission to be
made on the sale of one automobile they opened their eyes very wide.
“Let’s do it!” exclaimed Tom. “Why, if we could sell three or four of
those cars a year we wouldn’t have to do anything else!”
“You bet we’ll do it!” replied Jimmy emphatically. “But we won’t handle
this line. We’ll find a car that sells at about a thousand dollars――――”
“But we wouldn’t make nearly so much, would we?”
“Not on one sale, but the point is that you can sell three cheap cars
to one high-priced one, and the more cars we can sell the more tires we
can sell, and the more gasoline and oil and everything else――including
repairs! Why the dickens I didn’t think of taking an agency I don’t
see!”
“There’s a fellow right over here on Linden Street who is an agent,”
said Willard, “but I don’t believe he does much.”
“Gooch?” Jimmy shrugged his shoulders expressively. “He hasn’t enough
life in him to sell a gold dollar for fifty cents! Besides, look at
the car he handles; nobody wants a Glynn car nowadays; it’s too heavy.
If we can get the agency for a car like the Day-Morton or Rugby, a car
that costs about six hundred for the runabout and nine or ten hundred
for a five-passenger touring model, we can sell three or four a year
now and a lot more later.”