He was soon on the road. Frank tried to forget the anxieties of the mail order business and his missing friend. He planned to cover six little towns by nightfall.
Frank had good luck from the start. At a crossroads there was a country schoolhouse, a general store and some twenty houses. The man running the store was just stocking in for the fall term of school. Frank came in the nick of time. He sold the man over ten dollars worth of notions and novelties.
Watering his horse at a roadhouse, a little later on, he interested some loungers on the veranda. Frank got rid of two rings, a cheap watch, a pedometer and three of Markham’s puzzles.
At noon he took dinner at Carrollville, quite a good-sized town. A small circus was playing here. Frank conceived the idea of buying a privilege to sell on the circus grounds. The manager wanted ten dollars for a permit, however, so Frank took up his stand near the railway depot.
As the crowds came for their trains at five o’clock, he opened up his novelty stock.
“A pretty thrifty day,” mused Frank, an hour later, as he started for his final stop of the day at Gray’s Lake. “Profits eleven dollars and twenty cents. Why, thirty days of this kind of trade will give me back my lost capital.”
Gray’s Lake was a settlement and a summer resort. Frank put up the horse, got a good supper, and then selected the newest and most salable of the trinkets and novelties he carried in stock.
Among these was a good assortment of leather souvenir postal cards, just then a decided novelty outside of the large cities. He had brought along a large jewelry tray. This he suspended by a strap from his neck, and went up to the big hotel at the end of the lake.
A group of girls in a summer house running out over the water furnished Frank with his first customers. He sold two friendship rings and sixteen postal cards.
A crowd of idle men took fire on the puzzle proposition, as two men examining the wire devices got rating one another as to their respective ability to get the ring off first. A dozen puzzles were purchased in as many minutes.