"I'll do a
little figuring; then I'll talk things over with you," he said. During the
spring, summer and fall Ben had always employed another carpenter and an
apprentice, but when Clara came back to town he was employing four gangs
of six men each and had two foremen to watch the work and keep it moving,
while his son, who in other times would also have been a carpenter, had
become a salesman, wore fancy vests and lived in Chicago. Ben was making
money and for two years had not driven a nail or held a saw in his hand. He
had an office in a frame building beside the New York Central tracks, south
of Main Street, and employed a book-keeper and a stenographer. In addition
to carpentry he had embarked in another business. Backed by Gordon Hart,
he had become a lumber dealer and bought and sold lumber under the firm
name of Peeler and Hart. Almost every day cars of lumber were unloaded
and stacked under sheds in the yard back of his office. He was no longer
satisfied with his income as a workman but, under the influence of Gordon
Hart, demanded also a swinging profit on the building materials. Ben now
drove about town in a vehicle called a buckboard and spent the entire day
hurrying from job to job. He had no time now to stop for a half hour's
gossip with a prospective builder of a barn, and did not come to loaf in
Birdie Spinks' drug-store at the end of the day. In the evening he went to
the lumber office and Gordon Hart came over from the bank.
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