"Oh, yes; but sue a customer an' you lose a customer, an' there ain't any too many in this county, at best. Now, your uncle made sure, before he died, about all of 'm whose principal crop was wheat; but the wheat's then brought in an' sold, an' most of the money for it, after his own bills were paid, was in the check the lawyers sent you. The rest of the customers raised mostly corn an' pork,--most gen'rally both, for the easiest way to get corn to market is to put it into pork; twenty bushels o' corn, weighin' over a thousan' poun's, makes two hundred pound o' pork, an' five times less haulin'; besides, pork's always good for cash, but sometimes you can't hardly give corn away. Queer about corn; lot's o' folks that's middlin' sensible about a good many things seems to think that corn's only fit to feed to hogs an' niggers. Why, some o' 'em's made me so touchy about it that I've took travellin' business men up into my room, over the store, an' give 'em a meal o' nothin' but corn an' pork, worked up in half a dozen ways, an' it seemed as if they couldn't eat enough, but I couldn't see that the price o' corn went up afterwards. I'd like to try a meal o' that kind on you an' your wife some day. If the world took as easy to corn when it's ground into meal as when it's turned into whiskey, this section o' country would get rich." "I shouldn't wonder if it would. But what else?" "Well, you must get a square up-an'-down promise from each o' your customers that their pork's to come to you, you promisin' to pay cash, at full market price, for all above the amount that's owed you. You must have the cash ready, too." "But where am I to get it?" "Why, out of the first pork you can get in an' ship East or South. You must be smart enough to coax some of 'em to do their killin' the first week the roads freeze hard enough to haul a full load. They'll all put it off, hopin' to put a few more pounds o' weight on each hog, an' that mebbe the price'll go up a little." "But how am I to coax them?"