“What book?”
“Why, the feller that come along yisterday stickin’ up the bills said that you was about to put out a book tellin’ about yer wonderful adventures with the Toltecs while you was coastin’ down one of them old Peruvian roads in South Ameriky.”
“What sort of looking fellow was he?”
“Well, about so high and so wide. He was a sort of stocky chap with bright eyes and red cheeks. Come to think of it, when he got off his wheel to stick up the sign, I noticed that he toed in with one foot.”
“That was Jack Ready.”
“Was it? I didn’t know! I believe he did say somethin’ ’bout bein’ always Ready.”
“Aw! that feller’s a Yale man!” a boy was heard to sneer. “He ain’t never been in South Ameriky ner nothin’. I know them fellers soon’s I see ’em.”
“Be you a Yale man?” an old man growled, not relishing the idea of being drawn out and fooled in that way by a mere college student. He had walked nearly a mile to see the “Giant of the Wheel” go by, and he wanted his money’s worth.
Dick was saved from answering this disconcerting question by a young man with a pale face and large nose, who crowded forward to inspect the wheel, saying that he intended to purchase a bicycle the coming season.
“I thought, mebbe, when I heard that feller talkin’ yesterday, that it was one of them headless wheels made in Indianapolis. D’y’ever see one of ’em? You sort of set in the handle-bars as if they was the arms of a rockin’chair. I didn’t know but I’d like to have one of ’em. I’m sure the feller said somethin’ ’bout headless!”