: The giftie gien by Jameson Malcolm Kramer Frank Illustrator - Short stories; Fantasy fiction; Businessmen Fiction; Future life Fiction

@FreeBooksThu 08 Jun, 2023

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THE GIFTIE GIEN

Illustrated by Kramer

It was five o'clock. The girls were getting ready to go home and the city salesmen were beginning to come trooping in. Mr. J. C. Chisholm, sales manager of the Pinnacle Office & Household Appliance Corp., folded his pudgy hands across his ample middle and sat back in his chair to watch the daily ritual going on beyond the clear-glass partition that separated his office from the salesmen's room. A bland smile was on his pink face and a stranger might have said that he appeared to be beaming with satisfaction and good will. At any rate, the smile was there, and, as a matter of fact, Mr. Chisholm was quite satisfied with himself. There was not the slightest doubt in his mind--and the incoming orders up to that hour were added proof of it--that he was the best little old sales manager POHAC had ever had. Consequently, he viewed the activities beyond the partition with the utmost amiability.

Miss Maizie Delmar, his secretary, sat beside him, her notebook on her knee and her pencil poised in anticipation of any weighty utterance he might see fit to make. Not that she expected to take any notes for the next ten minutes, for she knew her boss quite as well as he thought he knew everybody else. This was the "psychic hour," as she caustically referred to it when outside the smothering confines of POHAC's. It amused Mr. Chisholm to display his keen powers of observation and his uncanny judgment of people. So she waited with a hard, set face for his first prediction. She knew that he would look at her from time to time to get her reaction, but she was ready for that. She had a little frozen smile and a gleam to put into her tired eyes that she could flash on and off like a light, but she reserved those until they were demanded.

"Har-rum," he observed, "Miss Carrick has now finished dabbing her nose. In exactly forty-three seconds she will fold her typewriter under and slam the lid. Then she will go to the window and look at the sky. It is cloudy, so she will put on her galoshes and take an umbrella."

He started his stop watch. Miss Delmar sighed inaudibly and waited. Of course he was right. Miss Carrick was an elderly and sour spinster and decidedly "set in her ways." She was as predictable as sunset and the tides.

"Forty-four seconds," he announced, triumphantly, snapping off the watch at the bang of the desk top. "Don't tell me. I know these people like a book. Nobody can slip anything over old J.C."

Miss Trevelyan was the next subject for prophecy. She had a well-established routine that was almost as rigid as that of Miss Carrick, though she was of a different type. Miss Trevelyan was a baby-doll beauty of the Betty Boop variety and with the voice to match. At the moment she was regarding herself anxiously in a ridiculously small compact mirror, tilting her head this way and that with quick birdlike jerks so as to better scrutinize nose, cheeks, eyes and ears. After that, as J.C. gleefully foretold, would come the powdering, the lip-sticking, the eyebrow-brushing--in the order named--and eventually an elaborate tucking-in of imaginary wisps of vagrant hair. J.C. didn't miss a bet.

Then three salesmen came in. Jake Sarrat, the big, jovial ace of the wholesale district, slapped the other two on the back, hurled his brief case and kit into a desk drawer, made a brief phone call, and then went out. Old Mr. Firrel wore his usual somber, tired look, and walked slowly to the bare table they had let him use. He unbent his lanky and stooped six feet of skin and bones and began dragging copious sheafs of notes from his brief case. Those he glanced at briefly and began tearing up, one by one. The third, a saturnine little fellow who appeared to be perpetually angry, marched straight to his desk and began scribbling furiously on a pad of report blanks. He was Ellis Hardy, Chisholm's pet.

"Jake," said Mr. Chisholm, confidently, "is working up a big case and wants to surprise me with it. Watch his smoke before the week is over. Ellis has just brought in a big one--stick around, we may pour a drink before we call it a day. As for Old Dismal, he's quitting. The poor dope!"

He twirled his chair around to face a mahogany cabinet. He opened the door of it, took out a bottle and glass, and poured himself a stiff slug of rye. He tossed it off with a grunt and swiveled back.

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