Chapter 8

Imogene helped me set up my office almost opposite the one her father used. She helped me pick out the furniture and the other stuff I needed. It was not long before she was doing more work for me than she was for her father. That was just the way things worked out. Oh, Mr. Arthur still had plenty of business, especially when word got around that my men, and sometimes myself, were providing the protection.

The problem was that no matter how much Mr. Arthur’s business used my people, he still could not use all of them all of the time. Of necessity, if I were to keep my people employed, I had to take jobs with other shippers. Very rarely did this result in a conflict between jobs, and when it did, everybody knew that my first commitment was to Mr. Arthur.

Imogene and her father helped me set up a fee schedule. I decided to pay the regular guards $7 per week and the supervisors, Joe and Sam, $10.50 per week. The men got paid whether or not they were working, but any that tried to take advantage of the largess were quickly fired. I furnished the shotguns and ammunition and the horses; the men provided everything else they needed for their personal use. Of course, they ate from my chuck wagon whenever they were on a run, but, otherwise, they had to supply their own food.

I was persuaded to charge $10 per day per man, and I set the level of guards to be one man per wagon, but there would never be less than two guards on a trip. That meant that the minimum charge was going to be $20 per day. Any time that I personally made a trip, I charged $20 per day premium for me above the regular rate. I rarely made more than one trip for a client before he trusted my guards to live up to their promise to guard his stock as if it were their own.

The first time a client signed up with Adams Protection Agency, he usually tried to bargain the price down because it sounded so expensive to hire us. I usually got around that by pointing out how much it would cost if bandits killed his drivers and stole his loaded wagons. Normally, that was enough to persuade the client that he was getting a bargain. I sure thought he was.

Adams Protection Agency took in approximately $500 per week. Of that, I got at least $250 per week after expenses. I was now living in one of the best hotel suites in town and wearing the best clothes available. Mr. Arthur insisted that I had to do that to project the image of a successful business man. That was certainly the lap of luxury as far as I was concerned, and I was still able to save at least $75 per week in a savings account that paid 0.5% interest every six months. Man, all of this was a grand step up from my days as a farmer in Vermont!

As it was, I was still turning away business, so I talked to Joe and Sam about enlarging our employment pool. They assured me that they could get 10 more reliable men within a week, if that was the number I wanted. They knew of several former sergeants who had recently been discharged by the Army because of budget cuts. I cut them loose to find us two more squads of a sergeant and four privates who would make good employees.

I promised them a bounty of $1 for the sergeants and 50¢ for the privates. They smiled with glee at that and promised to get right on it. I suspected that they already had men bugging them about getting on where they could earn so much money. I was paying the highest wages in Los Angeles at the time. It was well above what a common soldier could earn, even an NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer). Of course, the Army provided food and lodging, so the soldier did not have to pay for that.

Yeah, I was right. Both Joe and Sam produced their quota of five men each by the end of the following day. It took an effort not to laugh as I counted out their bounties of $3 each. These were all former Army men, and cavalry at that, so there was no real training involved, other than making sure that they knew our operating standards.

Fortunately, Mr. Arthur had a large wagon train leaving in two days, so I took on the job of leading all 10 men on what amounted to a training mission over a period of eight days. There were only seven wagons in the train, so the guard detail was somewhat overstaffed, but that made no difference. I only charged what a train of seven wagons would normally cost if I were also making the trip.

Joe and Sam took on the routine trips that week, and I had a chance to see just how well trained the new men were. My God, what was the Army thinking of, letting this many good men go after what it had cost to train them. Damn those politicians back in Washington who had no idea what it was like to live on the frontier.

As it turned out, we had a major skirmish with Indians on this trip, and everybody had a chance to fire at least one shot in defense of the wagon train. As a result, most of the men felt like this was a cushy job and figured that all of their trips would be so easy. I did not disillusion them. When we got back to Los Angeles, I was sure that all of the men could do their job, and I did not have to worry about them.