back.
"Do I get the job?" asks Alex.
"Do you get the job!" yells friend manager, slappin' him on the back. "No, you don't get it – only if you leave here without signing your name to a five-year contract and accepting a check for fifteen hundred dollars' commission and as much more as you want to draw on your expense account, I'll – I'll – murder you! But first, you lunch with me at the Fitz-Barlton and we'll map out a campaign – "
"Gimme that eight hundred!" says Alex to me.
I passed it over still semi-conscious.
Alex stretches his arms, puts the money away and grins.
"Get me that Eve girl on the phone, will you?" he tells me. "I – I had a little bet with her, too!" He lights the cigar Buck Rice had give him in the mornin', blows out some smoke and looks over at Broadway, jammed with the matinée crowd. "Some burg!" he says, shakin' his head and grinnin' at me!
CHAPTER II
THE SELF-COMMENCER
There's nothin' the world loves so much as a good tryer. I don't mean the birds that havin' everything in their favor, includin' a ten-mile start, finishes first in the Big Race – I'm talkin' about the guys that never get better than second or third, but generally land in the money. The old Consistent Charlies that, no matter how many times they're beaten, figures the time to quit is when you're dead and buried!
Did you ever stop to think that the tryers which never get nowhere is responsible for the other guys' success? They're the babies that make a race or a fight out of it, and if it wasn't for them dubs there'd be no successes at all. In order to have winners, we got to have losers, don't we? And don't forget that yesterday's losers are to-morrow's winners and vice-president or vice versa, whatever it is.
A fighter knows that these birds which come up smilin' no matter how many times he drops 'em for the count is as dangerous as dynamite, until he knocks 'em cold. No matter how bad this loser may be battered up, he's always got a chance while he's tryin'. I've seen guys that was winnin' by two miles curl up and quit before a dub they had beaten till the crowd was yellin' for mercy, simply because this poor bunged-up simp kept comin' in all the time – battered, bloody, drunk with wallops —but tryin' up to the last bell!
Now these guys may never get nowhere, but they're the birds that's put most of the guys that do where they are. Why? Think it over! You gotta be good to beat them birds, don't you? They make competition keen, they keep the other guys on their toes, they're the gasoline that keeps the old world goin' forward on high and the birds that get over are only the chauffeurs. You gotta have both to run the car and the universe wouldn't move forward six inches if we didn't have one failure for every success.
So if you've failed to set the world on fire up to date, don't walk out on the dock to see what kind of a jump it is. If you can't be a winner, you can be a good loser and it's a toss-up which is the bigger thing! A guy who can beat the yellah streak we all pack somewheres, every time he fails to register a win, and will keep rememberin' that to-morrow has got yesterday beat eighty-seven ways, is no loser! On paper he mightn't be a winner, but he is. He's a bigger winner than the bird that gets over, because he's whipped the quit in him without no kind applause to cheer him on. I've seen losers that attracted more attention in runnin' last than any six winners in the same precinct.
Them kind of birds can't help tryin'. They couldn't quit if they wanted to, which they don't! They got somethin' in 'em that keeps shovin' 'em along whether they're regrettin' the breaks or not. They're always full of the old ambish no matter what the score is in the ninth. They're what you might call self-starters in the automobile of life – they don't need a win now and then to crank 'em up, they keep goin' forward hittin' on all cylinders from the nursery to the embalmer!
Alex was one of them guys.
The Big Town fell for his stuff because it was new, the same as it will fall for yours to-morrow if you get somethin' it never seen and the nerve to try it out!
About a month after Alex was workin' as head salesman for the Gaflooey Auto Company at a pittance of ten thousand a year, he come up to the flat for dinner one night. I seen right away that somethin' was wrong, because he only eat about half of the roast duck and brung along his own cigars. After nature could stand no more, and we had dragged ourselves away from the table to let the servant girl make good, we adjourn to the parlor and the wife gets ready to punish the neighbors with the victrola.
"Well," says Alex, sittin' down in the only rocker, of course, "it looks like they have finally gimme somethin' that even I can't do!"
"Can that be possible?" I says, pickin' up the sportin' final.
"Wait till you hear this one!" remarks the wife, crankin' up the victrola. "John McCormack singin' 'If Beauty Was Water, You'd Be Niagara Falls!' It's a knockout!"
"Say!" snorts Alex, gettin' peeved. "Can't a man find no attention here?"
"Look in the telephone book under the A's," I says.
"Never mind, dearie!" the wife tells him. "I'll listen. What's on your mind?" She goes over and sits on the arm of his chair, knowin' full well it gets my goat.
"I see you're the only one in this family that's got any sense!" pipes Alex, pattin' her hand.
"Yen," I says, "I ain't got enough sense to turn on a radiator. All I'm good for is to get the dollars, which of course is nothin' at all in keepin' up the home!"
"Well, you'll never have Rockefeller and that crowd gnashin' their teeth with all the dollars you'll get!" says Alex, "and that ain't no lie!"
"Now, boys," butts in the wife, "let's all be friends even if we do belong to the same family. What is it, Alex? Speak up like a man."
"Well," he says, "the Gaflooey people has started to make tourin' cars and roadsters! What d'ye think of that?"
"I'm simply dumfounded!" I says. "Has Congress heard about this?"
"There you go again!" snorts Alex. "Always tryin' to ridicule everything I do. It's simply a case of sour grapes with you – jealousy, that's all!"
"Sour grapes ain't jealousy," I says. "Sour grapes is brandy. Go on with your story, Alex."
"Don't mind him," whispers the wife in his ear. "He'd laugh in church!"
"Why not?" I says. "I ain't done no gigglin' since you and me first went there together."
"Will you let go?" she says. "Go on, Alex."
"Well," he says, "they called me into the president's office to-day, and the former begins by tellin' me I'm the best salesman they ever had."
"He don't care what he says, does he?" I butts in. "I suppose you admitted the charge, eh?"
"After that," goes on Alex, snubbin' me, "he tells me they have decided to get into the pleasure car game, instead of just makin' trucks and the like. Their first offerin' is gonna be one of them chummy, clover-leaf roadsters which will hold five people comfortably."
"If they're well acquainted!" I says.
"Will you leave the boy alone?" asks the wife. "I never saw anybody like you in my life!"
"Don't I know it?" I says. "Otherwise, how would we ever of got married?"
"Now,"
