"Absolutely," declared Wallingford. "Why, man, that back curtain of yours is ten per cent. dividends."

"Then I'll wear it," agreed the doctor resignedly; "but I hate to. You know I've honed for years to quit this batting around the country, and just ached to wear short hair and a derby hat like a white man."

Wallingford looked at the weather-bronzed face and shook his head.

"What a pity that would be!" he declared. "However, Doc, your wanderings cease from this minute, and your salary begins from to-day."

"Fine," breathed the doctor. "I say, Wallingford, then suppose you order me about three gross of bottles and some fresh labels. I'll get the drugs myself and start in making a supply of the Sciatacata."

"You just nurse your leg," advised Wallingford. "Why, man, when we start manufacturing the Peerless it will be in vats holding a hundred gallons, and will be bottled by machinery that will fill, cork and label a hundred bottles a minute. You're to superintend mixing; that's your job."

It took many days, days of irksome loafing for the doctor, before they had their final incorporation papers. Immediately they elected themselves as directors, made Quagg president, Wallingford secretary and Albert Blesser treasurer, and voted for an increase of capitalization to one-half million dollars. They gave Quagg his hundred shares and Wallingford his fifty; they voted Quagg his salary and Wallingford his royalty; also they voted Wallingford an honorarium of twenty-five per cent., payable in stock, for disposing of such of the treasury shares as they needed issued, and immediately Wallingford, who had spent the interim in cultivating acquaintances, began to secure investors.

He sold more than mere stock, however. He sold Doctor Quagg's hair and sombrero; he sold glowing word pictures of immense profits, and he sold the success of all other patent medicine companies; he sold his own imposing height and broad chest, his own jovial smile and twinkling eye, his own prosperous grooming and good feeding--and those who bought felt themselves blessed.

First of all, he sold fifty thousand dollars' worth for twenty-five thousand to young Corbin, whereupon Mr. Blesser, as per instructions, resigned from the treasurership and directorate in favor of Mr.

Corbin. Wallingford got fifteen thousand dollars from Doctor Lazzier, and ten from young Paley, and with fifty thousand dollars in the treasury sent for an advertising man and gave out a hundred-thousand-dollar contract.

"For the first half of this campaign," he explained to the advertising man, "I want this one ad spread everywhere: 'Laugh at That Woozy Feeling.' This is to cover the top half of the s.p.a.ce in good, plain, bold letters. In place of leaving the bottom blank for kids to scribble reasons of their own why you should laugh at that woozy feeling, we'll put gray shadow-figures there--grandpa and grandma and pa and ma and Albert and Henry and Susan and Grace and little Willie, all laughing fit to kill. And say, have it a real laugh. Have it the sort of a laugh that'll make anybody that looks at it want to be happy. Of course, later, I want you to cover up the bottom half of that advertis.e.m.e.nt with: 'Use Doctor Quagg's Peerless Sciatacata,' or something like that, but I'll furnish you the copy for that when the time comes. It will be printed right over the laughing faces."

"It should make a very good ad," commented the agent with enthusiasm, writing out the instructions Wallingford gave him, and willing to approve of anything for that size contract.

Wallingford went home to his wife, filled with a virtuous glow.

"You know, there's something I like about this straight business, Fannie," said he. "It gives a fellow a sort of clean feeling. I'm going to build up a million-dollar business and make everybody concerned in it rich, including myself. Already I've placed one hundred thousand dollars' worth of stock, have fifty thousand dollars cash in the treasury, and fifty-five thousand dollars' worth of stock for myself."

She looked puzzled.

"I thought you were to get only twenty-five per cent. for selling the stock."

He chuckled; shoulders, chest and throat, eyes and lips and chin, he chuckled.

"Twenty-five per cent. of the par value," said he, "payable in stock at the market price."

"I don't see the difference," she protested. "I'm sure I thought it was to be straight twenty-five per cent., and I'm sure all the members of the company thought so."

He patiently explained it to her.

"Don't you see, if I sell one hundred thousand dollars' worth of stock, I get the same as twenty-five thousand dollars for it, and with that buy fifty thousand dollars' worth of stock? Of course I get it at the same price as others--fifty per cent."

"Did they understand you'd get fifty thousand instead of twenty-five thousand?" she asked.

He chuckled again.

"If they didn't they will," he admitted.

She pondered over that thoughtfully for a while.

"Is that straight business?" she inquired.

"Of course it's straight business or I wouldn't be doing it. It is perfectly legitimate. You just don't understand."

"No," she confessed, "I guess I don't; only I thought it was just twenty-five per cent."

"It is twenty-five per cent.," he insisted, and then he gave it up.

"You'd better quit thinking," he advised. "It'll put wrinkles in your brow, and I'm the one that has the wrinkles scheduled. I've just contracted for one hundred thousand dollars' worth of advertising, and I've got to go out to sell enough stock to bring in the cash. Also, I've rented a factory, and to-morrow I'm going to let out contracts for bottling machinery, vats and fixtures. I've already ordered the office furniture. You ought to see it. It's swell. I'm having some lithographed stationery made, too, embossed in four colors, with a picture of Doctor Quagg in the corner."

"How much stock has the doctor?" she asked.

"Ten thousand."

"Is that all he's going to have?" she wanted to know.

"Why, certainly, that's all he's going to have. I made the bargain with him and he's satisfied."

"Ten thousand dollars' worth out of a half-million-dollar corporation?

Why, Jim, for his medicine, upon which the whole business is built, he only gets--how much is that of all of it?"

"One fiftieth, or two per cent.," he told her.

"Two per cent.!" she gasped. "Is that straight business, Jim?"

"Of course it's straight business," he a.s.sured her. "Of course," and he smiled, "Doc didn't stop to figure that he only gets two per cent.

of the profits of the concern. He figures that he's to draw dividends on the large hunk of ten thousand dollars' worth of stock, and he's satisfied. Why aren't you?"

"I don't know," she replied slowly, still with the vague feeling that something was wrong. "Really, Jim, it don't seem to me that straight business is any more fair than crooked business."

Wallingford was hugely disappointed.

"And that's all the appreciation I get for confining myself to the straight and narrow!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, I didn't mean that, Jim," she said, with instant contrition. "You don't know how glad I am that now, since we're married, you have settled down to honorable things; and you'll make a fortune, I know you will."

"You bet I will," he agreed. "In the meantime I have to go out and dig up seventy-five thousand dollars more of other people's money to put into this concern; _which will give me another seventy-five thousand dollars' worth of stock_! Straight business pays, Fannie!"

CHAPTER XXVI

DOCTOR QUAGG PROVES THAT STRAIGHT BUSINESS IS A DELUSION AND A SNARE

Within a short time Wallingford had the satisfaction of seeing bill-boards covered with his big sign ordering the public to "Laugh at That Woozy Feeling," but not yet telling them how to do it, and he heard people idly wondering what the answer to that advertis.e.m.e.nt was going to be. Some of them resented having puzzles of the sort thrust in front of their eyes, others welcomed it as a cheerful diversion.

Wallingford smiled at both sorts. He knew they would remember, and firmly link together the mystery and the solution. Cards bearing the same mandate stared down at every street-car rider, and newspaper readers found it impossible to evade the same command. All this advertising, for the appearance of which Wallingford had waited, helped him to sell the stock to pay for itself, and, in the meantime, he was busy putting into his new factory a bottling plant, second in its facility if not its capacity, to none in the country. He installed magnificent offices and for the doctor prepared an impressive private apartment, this latter being a cross between an alchemist's laboratory and a fortune-teller's oriental _salon_; but alas and alack! the first day the doctor walked into his new office he had his hair close-cropped and wore a derby, with such monstrous effect that even Wallingford, inured as he was to most surprises, recoiled in horror!

From that moment the doctor became a hard one to manage. His first protest was against the Benson House, the old-fashioned, moderate-rate hotel which he had always patronized and had always recommended wherever he went. Thereafter he changed boarding-houses and family hotels about every two weeks; but he never had his hair cut after the once. The big mixing vats that Wallingford installed he grew to hate.

He was used to mixing his Sciatacata in a hotel water-pitcher and filling it into bottles with a tin funnel; and to mix up a hundred gallons at a time of that precious compound seemed a cold, commercial proposition which was so much a sacrilege that he went out and "painted the town," winding up in a fight with a cigar-store Indian.

He left such a train of fireworks in his wake that Wallingford heard of it for weeks afterward.