lion 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.
