"What would we do if some merchants in the town, who are not members of the association, should take them on?" I asked. I saw a twinkle in Barlow's eye, for he knew I was thinking of Stigler, who was not a member of the organization. "I should think," said Wimple, who was the president, "that we had better not try to cross that bridge until we come to it. The leading merchants belong to the association, and I question very much whether the fact that some small store might handle the stamps would have any effect upon us, one way or the other." I hoped and believed that we had killed trading stamps so far as our town was concerned, but I determined that, if ever the question was to come up again, through some of the others taking up stamps, I would suggest that idea of Fellows', that we form a trading stamp organization of our own, which the association could run. In other words, the Merchants' Association would be the trading stamp concern, and so we would have any benefits coming from it ourselves. CHAPTER XXIV PREPARING FOR THE BATTLE As soon as possible, I visited the landlords of all the empty stores in town, and contracted to rent the windows in seven of them for two weeks beginning the first of October. Two of the stores I couldn't get because they had been rented for the first of October; one I didn't go to at all because I remembered, fortunately, in time, that the landlord was a friend of Stigler's. If I had told him what I wanted, the probabilities were that Stigler would have got wind of it and he would somehow have got ahead of me. The total expense was less than twenty dollars. Two stores I got for nothing, and I found out that Barlow owned them. The old brick had told his agent to let me have them for two weeks without any cost. Traglio, the druggist, let me have the vacant store next door to him, which he owned, for $2.00 a week, on the understanding that I would not display any toilet articles, and that I would put a card in the window, at my own expense, reading: "For toilet articles of all kinds go to Traglio's." I didn't think that would hurt me any, so I promised to do it. It cost me $12.00 for the old Bon Marche store, but that was right opposite the post office, and I thought it well worth the money, because everybody in town would see the displays there. Besides, they were big windows. It had been a prosperous store, but Waldron, who ran it, had lost his money in a big Providence bank failure.