we had two men working upstairs. The third day we had a gadget made so that we could roll a car’s front wheel on it and then pull the car anywhere. That was when we began to get our breath. The other way had been tough. I don’t know how Slim stood it at all; if I hadn’t worked in the wheat-fields all summer I would have fallen from exhaustion.

We had two of those gadgets made and then we tilted the reducing stall a little. We’d block the wheels with a two-by-four after we had a car inside, then reduce it, take out the block, let the car roll onto the gadget and haul it away. We arranged them on the concrete floor in rows about four feet apart. When somebody came back to get their car out we had to pinch-bar the car back up on the gadget and wheel it to the stall.

The second week we had two stalls, one reducing and one expanding, and Slim was talking of having a new sloping floor put in to help in handling. By that time we were handling two thousand cars a day; you can do your own arithmetic.

On the last day of the month, LaBombard came in to collect his next month’s rent. He was all eyes and he said he didn’t see how we could do it. “You took in twenty-two hundred cars yesterday and this building won’t hold over six hundred,” he said, his eyes darting all around. “You must have a fast turnover.”

Slim kidded him. “We put ’em on the roof,” he said, and paid him and pushed him out. I didn’t like the look in that man’s eyes as he left.

“Well,” said Slim exuberantly to me, “we’re sitting on thirty thousand dollars. Think you can get through college on that?”

“I hope I can take time off to get a haircut,” I said fervently. It was embarrassing to have people look at me and suddenly snicker and turn away to hide their faces. The trouble was, we didn’t dare turn the reducing over to anybody else, and so we both worked like robots.