“What difference?”

“I’ll show you what a real porch-climber is like.”

“Indeed!  I’ll think it over.”

Ten minutes later Miss Santa Fe called up again.

“Hello!  I want Mitchell, the junior partner.”

“This is Mitchell.”

“Did you say those rivets were two-fifty?”

“Should they be?”

“They should.”

“They are.”

“Ship them to Trinidad.”

“That’s bully of you, Miss Santa Claus.  I want to—­” But the wire was dead.

Mitchell grinned.  Personality did count after all, and he had proved that it could be projected over a copper wire.

An hour later when Miss Northwestern called him for a price on stay-bolt iron she did not ring off for fifteen minutes, and at the end of that time she promised to take the first opportunity of having another chat.  In a similar manner, once the ice had been broken at the C. & E.I., Mitchell learned that the purchasing agent was at West Baden on his vacation; that he had stomach trouble and was cranky; that the speaker loved music, particularly Chaminade and George Cohan, although Beethoven had written some good stuff; that she’d been to Grand Haven on Sunday with her cousin, who sold hats out of Cleveland and was a prince with his money, but drank; and that the price on corrugated iron might be raised ten cents without doing any damage.

On the following afternoon Murphy, the Railroad Sales Manager, stopped on his way past Mitchell’s desk to inquire: 

“Say, have you been sending orchids to Miss Dunlap over at the Santa Fe?  I was in there this morning, and she wanted to know all about you.”

“Did you boost me?” Louis inquired.  “It won’t hurt your sales to plug my game.”

“She said you and she are ‘buddies’ over the wire.  What did she mean?”

“Oh, wire pals, that’s all.  What kind of a looker is she, Mr. Murphy?”

The Sales Manager shrugged his shoulders.  “She looks as if she was good to her mother.”  Then he sauntered away.

Mitchell, in the days that followed, proceeded to become acquainted with the Big Four, and in a short time was so close to the Lackawanna that he called her Phoebe Snow.  The St. Paul asked for him three times in one afternoon, and the Rock Island, chancing to ring up while he was busy, threatened to hang crepe on the round-house if he were not summoned immediately to enter an order for a manhole crab.

Within a week he became the most thoroughly telephoned person in the office, and had learned the tastes, the hopes, the aims, and the ambitions of his respective customers.  Miss C. & E.I., for instance, whose real name was Gratz, was a bug on music; Miss Northwestern was literary.  She had read everything Marion Crawford ever wrote, and considered her the greatest writer Indiana had produced, but was sorry to learn from Mitchell that her marriage to Capt.  Jack Crawford had turned out so unhappily—­some men were brutes, weren’t they?  There was a hidden romance gnawing at the Big Four’s heart, and Phoebe Snow had a picture of James K. Hackett on her desk and wanted to start a poultry farm.  The Santa Fe had been married once, but had taken her maiden name, it was so much pleasanter in business.