The Floor of Heaven Read Online Free Page B

things, a thought popped into his head: Why not open a store? He mulled the possibility for only a few moments and, satisfied, judged that it offered as good a prospect as any job he’d get in town.
    After breakfast, as the rash plan took deeper hold, he strung together some wishful logic and shared it with his wife. Rough as Caldwell was, he explained, eager to convince himself as much as Mamie, there was no denying the town was growing rapidly. A storekeeper who didn’t mind a bit of hard work should be able to find himself plenty of customers.
    Full of confidence, he rented a vacant room on Main Street and only then began to set about trying to determine what he might sell. He was sitting in the empty space, puffing with a focused, pensive concentration on one of his adored brown cigars, when a flash of inspiration struck.
    Other than whiskey and women, what was the one thing you could always count on a cowboy’s having a taste for? The answer was, literally, right on his lips: cigars! What would a night of celebrating in a good-time cow town be without a cigar or two? And it wasn’t, he raced on with a building enthusiasm, just the cattlemen he could count on as customers. The army was a growing presence in Caldwell. Cavalry brigades had originally arrived to patrol the nearby Indian Territory; keeping the peace between the Texas ranchers who were leasing grazing land to fatten their steers before shipping them east and the renegades intent on poaching required a good deal of diligence. Now additional troops were arriving in Caldwell to turn back the wagons loaded down with homesteaders hoping to sneak over the border and stake their claims to farmland in the Oklahoma Territory. Charlie was certain both the soldiers and the “Oklahoma boomers” flocking to town would also have a hankering for a good cigar.
    He scraped together a few hundred dollars to get started and, aided by the seemingly unlimited credit obliging bankers made available, ordered a large shipment of cigars from an eastern factory. The cigars sold quickly, so an excited Charlie decided to offer his customers something more special. Just as cattlemen branded their herd, Charlie got the notion that he should display his own brand name, too. He grandly ordered 100,000 cigars with a trademark phrase, THE OKLAHOMA BOOMER, printed on a distinctive wrapper. It was a colossal shipment; on the day of delivery, boxes on top of boxes of cigars were crammed into the small store. For an uneasy moment, even Charlie wondered if his expectations had been extravagant. But his inventive marketing gamble worked. “They sold like hot cakes,” he bragged. In less than a year, Charlie had become, he announced with a self-made man’s unrestrained pride, “the Oklahoma border cigar king.”
    Enjoying his newfound success, Charlie, always bold, decided to expand. He rented the adjoining store, cut an archway between the two rooms, and, once again guided by his own whimful appetitites, announced that he was opening an ice cream and oyster parlor.
    It was a bit of an undertaking and, in addition, a costly one. The oysters, packed into deep wooden crates cushioned by sawdust and thick blocks of ice, would need to be shipped by railroad from the East. The ice cream could be churned locally, but people would need to be hired to do the time-consuming work. And since electricity had not yet made its way across the plains to Caldwell, the store’s freezers, loaded down with the vats of ice cream and crates of oysters, would require nearly constant hand-cranking. But Charlie was not discouraged by either the complications or the expense. He had been raised in Matagorda County, Texas Gulf Coast country, and fresh, fruit-studded ice cream and briny oysters had been his most coveted childhood treats. He had no doubts that fully grown cowboys and dirt farmers and cavalry men would also have a taste for his boyhood delicacies. And he was right. His Main Street ice cream and oyster