“Well, I got to turn over a new leaf, and that's a fact,” Adams said. “I got a lot to do, and the only way to accomplish it, it's got to be done soon, or I won't have anything to live on while I'm doing it.”
“What you talkin' about? What you got to do except to get strong enough to come back to the old place?”
“Well——” Adams paused, then coughed, and said slowly, “Fact is, Charley Lohr, I been thinking likely I wouldn't come back.”
“What! What you talkin' about?”
“No,” said Adams. “I been thinking I might likely kind of branch out on my own account.”
“Well, I'll be doggoned!” Old Charley Lohr was amazed; he ruffled up his gray moustache with thumb and forefinger, leaving his mouth open beneath, like a dark cave under a tangled wintry thicket. “Why, that's the doggonedest thing I ever heard!” he said. “I already am the oldest inhabitant down there, but if you go, there won't be anybody else of the old generation at all. What on earth you thinkin' of goin' into?”
“Well,” said Adams, “I rather you didn't mention it till I get started of course anybody'll know what it is by then—but I HAVE been kind of planning to put a liquid glue on the market.”
His friend, still ruffling the gray moustache upward, stared at him in frowning perplexity. “Glue?” he said. “GLUE!”
“Yes. I been sort of milling over the idea of taking up something like that.”
“Handlin' it for some firm, you mean?”