GOSH! Gosh Almighty!" exclaimed Milton Morris in delightful amazement when George rushed with his exciting news into the little factory on Franklin Street. "Gosh! . . . You did it, by golly, didn't your . . . Well, darned if I didn't think you would—somehow or other. And to prove that I thought so, look here, George, I've been figuring out how we could allot our parts orders to get out these eleven hundred cars."
He pointed to some memoranda on a page of scratch paper, and began to read off the names of the different manufacturers, "It's mainly the matter of assembly room that bothers me," he finally added. "I was looking at the lot next door and the three behind us. If you think you're going to get money so fast, we could stretch a corrugated roof over those lots and that would give us floor space to throw the eleven hundred cars together in."
But George vetoed this instantly. His success with Stephen Gilman had made him feel like a Napoleon. "Too small to do any permanent building on," he said, "but the ground is all right for temporary service. Tell you what we'll do." His mind was working quickly, and he spoke in the same manner. "Get a short term lease on those lots and by the time your parts deliveries begin to come in I'll pick up a circus tent somewhere. 'MORRIS-JUDSON AUTOMOBILE WORKS EXPANDING SO FAST THEY ARE ERECTING ELEVEN HUNDRED CARS UNDER A CIRCUS TENT.' Guess that won't be a bad press story! eh?"
Milton Morris, over the top of his steel-rimmed glasses, gazed at his young associate, wideeyed and thoughtful, as he considered the circus tent idea. "You're so dodgasted young and immature you don't know there is any such thing as fail, do you, son?" he inquired benignly.
Four days later George was able to report to Mr. Gilman that while three of the persons on his list had declined with a superior smile the opportunity to become stockholders in the Morris-Judson Automobile Company, eight others had seized upon it with more or less avidity, one taking as many as twenty thousand shares and one as few as three thousand; but all had been taken. Mr. Gilman nodded his gratification and gave George a pat on the back.
The infant concern had now one hundred thousand dollars of new cash in its treasury. Milton Morris contemplated this delightful state of affairs without any special expression of wonder. He was getting used to miracles now.
"The next thing now is to go out and buy about fifty thousand dollars worth of ink," announced the Secretary-Treasurer complacently.
"Fifty thousand dollars for ink?" murmured Milton Morris dazedly and began to look for the joke.
"Printer's ink!" elaborated George, airily.
"Fifty thousand dollars for advertising?" Milton demanded in shocked tones. The equal of the value of the factory he had spent twenty years in building, good will and all, to be spattered over the country in a few weeks in one wild splash of printer's ink!
George saw the unbelief on the gray, slowthinking face, saw his stubborn unwillingness to consent to any such programme of extravagance, and understood it. He knew he had shocked him too much by the suddenness of his announcement, but George was accustomed to use the shock method in salesmanship. It was like dynamiting solid rock. It made shoveling easier afterward. And now he began to shovel.
"You keep thinking, Mr. Morris," he reminded the older man, "in terms of this little shop. Forget it and open your eyes wider! See that thousand car job, over and above the hundred already sold, that we have to build. You admit that you can build 'em for six hundred dollars a-piece. I think we'll do it for five hundred and fifty. We sell them at a thousand, dealers' commission twenty per cent. leaving us eight hundred. Out of that margin of profit we allot this fifty thousand for advertising."
Milton Morris gave a fine imitation of a shudder.
"Remember, Mr. Morris," challenged George, "there are two sides to this enterprise—building and selling cars. It's clear you can build the cars—that's already been figured out. Success thereafter depends not upon you, but upon me—upon my ability to have one thousand purchasers standing ready with the money in their hands as you roll the cars out to 'em. That's what I want the fifty thousand for. That's what I have to have it for. Don't you see?"
"I see the gamble, all right," admitted Mr. Morris. "I see; but it's awful hard on a conservative man like me to just pitch fifty thousand up in the air when—we are going to want so—so much—Say, young fellow! Do you realize that there's got to be something like five hundred thousand dollars for payrolls and materials poured through the cashier's window in order to swing this job?"
"But not all at once," insisted George, rising and beginning to talk, as was his custom when enthused, with hands, eyes and expression, as well as with his glib tongue. "We don't have to have that money all at once. Time, time, Mr. Morris, is to be the essence of all our contracts. First place, I'm going to ask you to let me take every one of these parts contracts and go out and place 'em myself. Time—time—time is what I'm going to demand. To begin with, nobody is going to dump deliveries on us all at once. I'm going to arrange to have so many engines, so many springs, and so forth, delivered us each week just as we want 'em. No payments for entire contract due at once, you see. Beyond that, in fact, I'm going to make all these parts people consent to a deferred payment system. The bait will be our contracts for next year, which, of course, will be four or five times as big."
"Four or five—" Milton Morris gasped.
"I'm going to push a lot of those payments away off into August and September," George boasted. "I'm going to make it clear that if they want our future business they have got to lend us some of their present-time credits. And believe me, Mr. Morris, I'm going to make them see that our business, widening out over a period of years, is going to be worth stretching a point to get an initial grip on."
"I concede you'll do that, George," admitted Mr. Morris. "I concede you'll do that if you start." Inevitably he was yielding to the enthusiasm of the younger man and to his colossal faith in his ability to do what he had planned.
"All right, then. We're agreed on our advertising campaign," said George, and pressed on eagerly, "now the first thing for you to do Mr. Morris, is to go ahead and make an external drawing of an automobile that is a lot better looking than any one else has ever produced for anything like the money. Just make the picture. Then give it to me. I'll sell the picture while you go to work to build a car that justifies the picture."
Milton Morris called in a commercial artist to help him; and a few days later George walked in upon the head of a prominent firm of advertising agents.
"I don't know a darned thing about writing advertisements, but I believe in 'em," he prefaced. "And I know how to sell goods. Now here's the car I'm going to build, and we've made an advertising appropriation of fifty thousand dollars. You take that picture and you create a demand that will absorb one thousand cars like that between March 1st and September 30th, and our advertising account is yours. Send a man out to the factory and Mr. Morris will give him the mechanical points; then send him to me and I'll tell him how I turn those points into arguments when I talk automobile. That's all. The rest is up to you."
"Not so fast, my dear Mr. Judson; not quite so fast," objected the head of Cooper-Braithwaite, a largish man with heavy shoulders, a clear eye, a strong face and rimless nose glasses through which he gazed very keenly, with an expression almost of disapproval; and yet it was difficult to register entire disapproval of such a glowingly well-intentioned young person as now stood before him.
"I will go to your factory myself, with you. Mr. Morris can demonstrate his mechanical points as you suggest; then you go to work to sell the car to me. If you succeed, I'll take your contract, and sell your cars to the reading public of America. If you don't sell it to me—convince me, that is, of its sound value—I won't touch it at all."
George was a little taken back. "Is that the way you fellows work?" he inquired rather breathless.
"It's the way somie of us work," returned the head of Cooper-Braithwaite, with discriminating emphasis.
"Well, it's the right way," decided George instantly.
As the time passed George was able, through his stockholders' influence, to borrow fairly freely from the banks. When the banks eventually drew the strings close—and they did this at a disappointingly low limit to George,—Thomas Pence, President of the Blue Lake Steamship Company and one of the stockholders interested through Stephen Gilman, generously opened his own check book.
"Stop worrying, George!" he told the anxious young man. "I'll lend you what money you need. Or quit this foolish little business soon as you can get away from it. It's good, of course, but it's little. It'll always be little. I'll take you into my steamship company, give you a block of stock, make you general manager in a couple of years, and you can stand to skim off a million before you're gray."
Pence had heard all about how George had worked out the allotment of the parts contracts; and he, in common with some others, was beginning to look upon young Judson as Milton Morris did, as a kind of a miracle-worker.
But George could say "No," to the steamship business. "Mr. Pence," he responded in that earnestly respectful way of his which always robbed disagreement of its offense, "if you think this is a little business you're a blind man. Automobile manufacture will be the biggest business in America in half a century. It'll be pretty good-sized in ten years. A million? Say, the Morris-Judson Company will do a million dollar business its first year!" Then he laughed at his own audacity, and astute old Thomas Pence laughed also.
"Hope so, George!" he hemmed. "Hope so!" and the way he opened up his check book would indicate that the hope was very firm.
From the time of this talk with "Uncle Tommy" as Pence's intimates called him, George began to ride entirely easy in his mind. He had grown a little tired with the strain of contest. He felt like a football player who had been playing every position on the team at one and the same time. He had smashed through the line, he had gone round the end, he had been tackled and gone down with the whole howling pack of opposing fates on top of him; yet always so far he had wriggled across the line to some kind of victory. And at last it began to look as if things were ripe for him to kick a goal from the field.
The month of May had come. That paltry one hundred cars which he had created so much of a sensation by selling in five weeks of the early autumn were manufactured and delivered two months ahead of time. The circus tent was up. It made George chuckle to see that old main-top thrusting its three centerpoles high in the air with a Morris-Judson pennant flying from each of them. And on the wide temporary floor beneath it the newest model of Milton-Morris was leaping into existence by scores.
It was a nifty looking car, really, George admitted that; and the Cooper-Braithwaite advertising campaign had worked out beautifully. Over three hundred orders were on file now, and scores of applications for the Morris-Judson agency were coming in from all over the country, mostly from old bicycle dealers.