“I need at least twenty-five hundred of them.”

”Twenty-five hundred bracelets?”

“No, just the zebras.”

“Look, is this a gag?”

“It’s no gag, mister,” I said. “I need those zebras. I’m willing to pay for them.”

“We haven’t any in stock.”

“Couldn’t you make them?”

“Not just twenty-five hundred of them. Wouldn’t be worth it to put through a special order for so few. If it was fifty thousand, say, we might consider it.”

“All right, then,” I said. “How much for fifty thousand?”

He named a price and we haggled some, but I was in no position to do much bargaining. We finally agreed on a price I knew was way too high, considering the fact that the entire bracelet, with the zebra and a lot of other junk, had only retailed at 39 cents.

“And hold the order open,” I told him. “We might want more of them.”

“Okay,” he said. “Just one thing—would you mind telling me what you want with fifty thousand zebras?”

“Yes, I would,” I said and hung up.

I suppose he thought I was off my rocker, but who cared what he thought?

It took ten days to get that shipment of fifty thousand zebras and I sweated out every minute of it. Then there was the job of getting them under cover when it came and, in case you don’t know, fifty thousand zebras, even when they’re only bracelet charms, take up room.

But first I took out twenty-five hundred and sent them through the desk.

For the ten days since we’d gotten the dust-collectors, we’d sent nothing through and there had been no sign from the Trader that he might be getting impatient. I wouldn’t have blamed him a bit if he’d done something, like sending through his equivalent of a bomb, to express his dissatisfaction at our slow delivery. I’ve often wondered what he thought of the long delay—if he hadn’t suspected we were reneging on the bargain.