The Golden Ledger
Copyright© 2026 by BillMax
Chapter 6: Making Big Money
In the little bedroom.
Her eyes brimming, Clara pulled Caleb aside. “Caleb, did you really go into a lake to act in weather this cold?”
“Yeah. Lily told you, huh?”
Caleb drew her over to the bed and chuckled. “Clara, let’s not talk about that right now. Take a look at how much I made today.”
He poured twenty-eight dollars into her hands.
Clara started, and her eyes went wide.
“How can this be? Caleb, where did you make so much money in a single day?”
Better than twenty dollars in a day was already beyond anything she could picture.
At this rate, wouldn’t her family be able to buy a house after New Year’s?
Caleb patted her shapely backside and said mysteriously,
“Now, I know you’re excited, but I have to warn you ahead of time: you’d best get used to your husband making big money.”
She’d have to get used to it, all right. A moment ago Clara had been aching for him, and now she was thinking about how to spend all that money.
Years of frugality had trained her to save wherever she could.
With their income jumping so suddenly, she wasn’t quite used to it.
“Caleb, Mother sent word. She wants us to spend New Year’s at her place.”
“Then let’s go. It’s no big deal.”
“But...”
Clara thought of how her husband ended up the butt of jokes every time they went there, and her first instinct was to refuse.
Caleb took her hand and comforted her. “There’s still better than ten days till then. Let’s work hard. By then we’ll have bought a house, and we’ll see who dares laugh at us.”
The daily life of an ordinary couple was just that simple. Every day they thought about how to make money and how to live a little better.
Clara bit her lip. Thinking of yesterday’s wild half hour, and with all of today’s excitement on top of it, she found she was craving that again something fierce.
She was still a young woman of twenty-five, after all.
Happy thoughts brought cravings with them, and Caleb was quick to start tugging at the buttons of her snug skirt.
Soon she was like a little white lamb.
Little Annie was still outside with her music box wound up loud, and she didn’t dare touch it.
Afterward Clara just snuggled in his arms, the two of them sharing a paper bag of peppermint candy.
The next day, at long last, the rain stopped.
His pushcart finally had a chance to shine. They lived near the Stonewell Iron Works, one of the biggest foundries in the whole country.
The foot traffic there was enormous.
He usually had plenty of good spots to sell from. Caleb called on his boyhood friend the Young Marshal, and the two of them took two carts and two mules to go fetch stock.
For street peddlers like them, California oranges fetched the highest price per crate, and naturally the highest profit.
But you could say there was a knack to it as well.
Fruit prices swung wildly. Oranges, for instance, had gone for a dollar twenty a crate a week ago, a crate running about thirty pounds.
That worked out to roughly two dozen oranges a crate.
These past few days they’d climbed to a dollar forty a crate, five or six dozen fruit in the bigger crates. The price had gone up twenty cents in just a few days.
Oranges sold well around Christmas and New Year’s, and fetched higher prices.
When they got to the fruit wholesale yard, it was jammed with wagons.
For a holiday fruit in such high demand, anybody who only wanted a crate or two got no attention at all.
Caleb looked around. He’d been knocking about this trade a few years, after all, and he knew quite a few people.
He spotted Old Gus’s wagons and hollered, “Old Gus, you still got stock?”
“Yep. How much you want?”
“What’s the price?”
Normally folks like them couldn’t buy direct this way. Street fruit sellers understood that.
Fruit only keeps so long, oranges included.
If a load started going soft past a certain point and couldn’t be sold, the wholesaler had to dump it cheap.
Otherwise, it could easily come back to bite him.
That kind of cheap fruit was where the real money was.
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