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“‘A Sabbath well spent brings a week of content
And plenty of health for the morrow;
But a Sabbath profaned, no matter what gained,
Is a certain forerunner of sorrow.’

“Down in the corner, where the glass was broken, one of the boys who had without doubt profaned the Sabbath, had written these words:

“‘A man who’s thrifty on Sunday’s worth fifty
Of a half-sanctimonious duck;
He will get along well if he does go to dwell
Where he’ll chew on Old Satan’s hot chuck.’

“My business the week before had been simply out of sight. The old man in the house wrote me the only congratulatory letter I ever got from him in my life. He was so well pleased with what I had done that he didn’t kick very hard even on the bill that I had slashed. But that next week–oh, my! I didn’t sell enough to buy honeysuckles for a humming bird. I began to think that maybe that Sunday bill had ‘queered’ me.”

“But how about Sunday now, Bill?” spoke up one of the boys. “Do you think you’d like to take a good fat order to-morrow?”

“Yes, I’ve grown not to mind it out in this country,” said Billy. “You know we’ve a saying out here that the Lord has never come west of Cheyenne.”

“I shall never forget my first experience,” said my old friend Jim, as we all lighted fresh cigars–having forgotten the Dutch pictures and the black oak furnishings.

“I had made a little flyer for the house to pick up a bill of opening stock out in Iowa. They all thought in the office that the bill wasn’t worth going after, so they sent me; but I landed a twenty-five hundred dollar order without slashing an item, a thing no other salesman up to that time had ever done, so the old man called me in the office and gave me a job just as soon as I came back.

“I started out with two hundred dollars expense money. The roll of greenbacks the cashier handed me looked as big as a bale of hay. I made a couple of towns the first two days and did business in both of them, keeping up the old lick of not cutting a price.

“The next town I was booked for was Broken Bow, which was then off the main line of the ‘Q,’ and way up on a branch. To get there I had to go to Grand Island. Now, you boys remember the mob that used to hang out around the hotel at Grand Island. That was the time when there were a lot of poker sharks on the road. When I was a bill clerk in Chicago I used to meet with some of the other boys from the store on Saturday nights, play penny ante, five-cent limit, and settle for twenty-five cents on the dollar when we got through–I was with a clothing firm, you know. I had always been rather lucky and I had it in my head that I could buck up against anybody in a poker game. I had no trouble finding company to sit in with. In fact, they looked me up. In those days there were plenty of glass bowls full of water setting ’round for suckers. My train didn’t leave until Monday morning and I had to Sunday at Grand Island.

“We started in on Saturday night and played all night long. By the time we had breakfast–and this we had sent up to the room–I was out about forty dollars. I wanted to quit them and call it off. I thought this was about as much as I could stand to lose and ‘cover’ in my expense account, but all of the old sharks said, ‘By jove, you have got nerve, Jim. You have the hardest run of luck in drawing cards that I ever saw.’ They doped me up with the usual words of praise and, after I had put a cup of coffee or two under my belt, I went at it again, making up my mind that I could stand to lose another ten. I figured out that I could make a team trip and ‘break a wheel’ to even up on expenses.