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couldn't pay cash for a radio, Harry would get five dollars down and a
note for the balance, and if the man couldn't make his payments,
Harry would attach the man's home, or his vineyard, or his
automobile, or his horse, or anything else the man owned. And the
amazing thing was that no one ever criticized him for his business
methods. He was very smooth about attaching a man's property, and
he would calmly explain that it was the usual procedure, according to
law. What was right was right.
No one could guess what Harry wanted with so much money.
He already had money in the bank, a big car, and he wasn't interested
in girls; so what was he saving up all the money for? A few of the
customers sometimes asked him, and Harry would look confused a
moment, as if he himself didn't know, and then he would come out
and say:
"I want to get hold of a half million dollars so I can retire."
It was rather funny, Harry thinking of retiring at eighteen. He
had left high school in his first year because he hadn't liked the idea
of sitting in a class room listening to a lot of nonsense about starting
from the bottom and working up, and so on, and ever since he had
been on the go, figuring out ways to make money.
Sometimes people would ask him what he intended to do after
he retired, and he would look puzzled again, and finally he would say,
"Oh, I guess I'll take a trip around the world."
"Well, if he does," everyone thought, "he'll sell something
everywhere he goes. He'll sell stuff on the trains and on the boats and
in the foreign cities. He won't waste a minute looking around. He'll
open a catalogue and sell everything you can think of."
But things happen in a funny way, and you can never tell about
people, even about people like Harry. Anybody can get sick. Death
and sickness have no favourites; they come to all men, presidents and
kings and movie stars, they all die, they all get sick.
Even Harry got sick. Not mildly, not merely something casual
like the flu that you can get over in a week, and be as good as new
again. Harry got T. B. and he got it in a bad way, poor kid.
Well, the sickness got Harry, and all his money in the Valley
Bank didn't help him a lot. Of course he did try to rest for a while, but
that was out of the question. Lying in bed, Harry would try to sell life
insurance to his best friends. Harry's cousin. Simon Gregory, told me
about this. He said it wasn't that Harry really wanted more money; it