Limekiller!

And, in such cases, the goods ordered eventually arriving, there they were, making such a brave display as to assure the next customer that all was well.

The next customer, in this case, being the Hector Manufacturing Company of Pittsburgh, Pa., and Sudbury, Ont..

Hector had made agreements with every supplier in King Town, and had ignored every supplier in the rest of the country. Hector was being supplied, it was still being supplied, one large cargo ship could have carried off everything in every warehouse in King Town down to Pine Tree Creek. However, no large cargo ship could get closer to King Town than two miles off-shore, whence cargo was lightered in — transferred, that is, to motor-barge. And it was thus impossible for any large or even moderate-sized cargo ship to engage in the coastal trade. So Hector’s cargo came down little by little, but it came in such a steady procession that Hector had not realized what was coming next.

To whit, and for quite a while: nothing.

In the meanwhile, that was exactly what Jack Limekiller was able to aquire in King Town.

Nothing.

He came up with the notion that he might at any rate try and see if things might be any better in Port Caroline. He even had the very get-up-and-go notion that he would actually telephone Port Caroline. That is to say, Port Caroline not being a person, it could not itself be telephoned: but he would phone some of the leading merchants in that other Out-District capital.

Very little research sufficed to advise him that none of them had a telephone. Not one. Not a single one. Supposedly, if any of the leading businessmen in Port Caroline required to phone someone of an equal status in, say, King Town, he simply walked down the street to the Telephone Office, in an out-building adjacent to the Post Office, and phoned from there. Cheaper to buy milk than to keep a cow, eh, Jack?

Well, there was the Royal Telegraphy. Her Majesty’s Government did not exactly go to much effort to advertise the fact that there was, but Limekiller had somehow found the fact out. The service was located in two bare rooms upstairs off an alley near the old Rice Mill Wharf, where an elderly gentleman wrote down in-coming messages in a truly beautiful Spencerian hand… or maybe it was Copperplate… or Chancery… or Volapuk. What the Hell. It was beautiful. It was, in fact, so beautiful that it seemed cavalier to complain that the elderly gentleman was exceedingly deaf, and that, perhaps in consequence, his messages did not always make the most perfect sense.

Gambling that the same conditions did not obtain at the Royal Telegraphy Office in Port Caroline, Limekiller sent off several wires, advising the Carolinian entrepreneurs what he wanted to buy, and that he was coming in person to buy it.

“How soon will these go off?” he asked the aged telegrapher.

“Yes, that is what I heard myself, sir. They say the estate is settle, sir. After ahl these years.” And he shook his head and he smiled a gentle smile of wonder.

Limekiller smiled back. What the Hell. What the Hell. What the Hell. He waved a goodbye and went downstairs. “The estate,” that was, of course, the Estate of Gerald Phillip Washburne, reputedly a millionaire in dollars, pounds, pesos, lempira, quetzales, and who knows what: the estate had been in litigation for decades, and, as regularly as the changes of the moon, it was reported settled. The case was like something out of Dickens. and so, for that matter, was the Royal Telegraphy Office.

Downstairs, suddenly, it all seemed futile. He leaned against the side of the building. Why not just say, The Hell With It: and go meekly back home and try for a nice, safe, low-paid, pensionable job with the Hudson’s Bay Company? He would only have to counterfeit a Scotch accent, and that suddenly seemed so much simpler than all this. This early evening breeze sprang up and blew a piece of the local newspaper against his legs. He reached down to detach it, picked it up, automatically glanced at it. WANTED [an advertisement read] One watch dog that gets vexed easily and barks and bites.

“I might apply for that job,” he said, to himself. Then he burst out laughing.

What the Hell?