The Anderson intelligencer. [volume] (Anderson Court House, S.C.) 1860-1914, 1898-04-13
THEY MUST PAY OR FIGHT.
Unique nethods Of 6 King Street Bill
Collector.

tuIuS cOuLIuuoS, ealu u "oki Auo"u
King street merchant TO q reporter for
the Me,os and Courier yesterday. II
am in a great deal Of trouble and the
cPanees are that my life is in dan
GER"
An expression of curiosity induced
him to continue, and he said:
cts not M fault, you know; it's
all misfortune. For the past year or
so 1 have been having a great deal Of
trouble with collectors. You see, run
ming a retail business, with several
hundred people on your books at the
end Of every month, you have to have
something Of a hustler to keep you
out of the suds. The first man | had
was an old chap who needed u nice:
light job and promised to give a kind
of tone to the place. lie was a very
good old fellow. but he knew SO little
about hustling hat after the first
week or so the hard cases quit lodging
him altogether, and got to slapping
him on the back and calling him ''old
chap"
II soon saw that he wouldn't do,
and tried a sleek young fellow, who
came here with n patent door bell, or
something of the kind. Fortunately
I required a bond of him, and when he
went to free Cuba recovered the
$50. 40 that he took with him from the
surety company. That was the near
est that I ever came to contributing to
the cause of Cuba Libre, by the way,
and l don't care to repeat the expert
ence.
Following the patent door bell
man, I tried three or four young fell
lows who thought they knew how to
brace the backsliders, and found my
SELF gradually getting further and fur
ther behind. You have no idea of the
number and variety of games that the
deiinQuents are up to, and | was
forced to acknowledge, as one after
another went, that my collectors were
unequal to the task. Even a profess
sional collector, who runs an agency
and claims to get moro blood out Of a
turnip than any other man in the city,
was compelled to acknowledge after a
short but heroic struggle, that he
found my crowd about the toughesth he
had ever tackled. Somehow or other
he seemed to think that I had had the
il! luck to get every particularly hard
case in the city on my books, and
frankly advised me to burn my bills
and advertise for a new set Of custom
ers. / might do better, he said, and 1
could not do worse.
l. "Well, things went On in that way
until ten days ago, and I had about
made up mind to present my custom
ers with clear receipts and go into
bankruptcy; when a red-headed boy
came into the Office and asked for a
job. He had a blue mark around his
left eye, and his nose was fully half
an inch out of plumb, but he had a
straightforward manner that attracted
me to him, and I asked him if he
could collect bills. 1t was easy to see
from the confidence Of his reply that
he had never collected a bill in his
life, though he claimed to have de-
voted the better part of his life to i.
So to take a little Of the starch out Of
him | carefully picked out a few Of
the worst | had -time-worn specimens
that had broken the hearts eff his pre-
decessors-and told him / would give
him 10 per cent. for all he could get
out Of them. He had some very good
references, and ! wasn't particularly
anxious anyway, as I had no idea he
would aver get his hands on a cent.
So I sent him ont. A few minutes
later I had occasion to go up tn
street, and at the corner fell in with a
crowd making for a storm center on
the next block. Thinking that Il
street car mad run over somebody I
fell in with it an fought my way to the
scene of the trouble. Imagine my
surprise when | found, not a mangled
victim OF electricity. but my new col
lector demolishing the features Of the
hardest case on my books. His own
features were fairly we'll disguised
with knuckle marks, but the other
man looked like a Whitehead torpedo
had Struck him. A policeman came
up about that time, and 1 lost another
hour going up to the Station House to
deposit good money for his appearance
before the Recorder next day. When
l asked him to explain he said: The
jay tried to get gay with him about a
bill and he had to call him down.