CHAPTER VI
JOE HAS AN IDEA
Joe’s circle of friends and acquaintances widened. He met many fellows through Jack, and Jack seemed to know most of the better sort of boys in the town. What sometimes puzzled Joe was how it had happened that Jack, with so many friends to choose from, had remained without a special chum and had finally chosen him. Joe got on very friendly terms with Tom Pollock and became a great admirer of that youth. Anyone with such a reputation as a pitcher and all-around ball-player as Tom had would have won Joe’s respect and regard in any case, but Tom was a very likable chap besides. Sam Craig he saw less of, although Sam was nice when they met, and more than once reminded him of the approaching fifteenth of February, on which day baseball practice was to start indoors.
By the beginning of February Joe was quite at home in Amesville and had grown to like the place thoroughly. He and Aunt Sarah were getting on finely. Aunt Sarah was outwardly still the same stern-visaged, sharp-voiced person, but Joe had discovered that under that rather forbidding exterior lay a very kind heart. Nowadays Aunt Sarah’s principal mission in life appeared to be the finding of new ways to please Joe, without, if possible, allowing him to suspect it!
Joe’s only cause for dissatisfaction was his after-school work. In less than a fortnight indoor practice would begin for the baseball squad, and that meant that either he would have to give up his newspaper route or abandon his hope of making the nine. Consequently, he began to look around harder than ever for some labour that he might perform in the evenings. He consulted Jack, of course, and Jack, while eager to aid, had nothing to offer in the way of practical suggestions. In the end, Joe solved the problem without assistance.
He and Jack happened to be in Pryor’s stationery store one afternoon. Jack was buying some fountain-pen ink and Joe strayed over to the counter that held a not very large assortment of magazines, together with the local newspapers and a few papers from other cities of the State. While he was turning the pages of a magazine a well-dressed, middle-aged man came in and asked for a Chicago Tribune. He was a travelling salesman, Joe concluded. Whether he was or not, he was contemptuously impatient when the clerk informed him that they didn’t keep Chicago papers.
“Don’t, eh?” he demanded. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t! I ought to have known it. You folks in this town don’t seem to know there’s any other place in the country. Still, you might have heard of Chicago. It’s a little village in Illinois, down near the lower end of Lake Michigan. There’s a tree in front of it. They were talking of building a horse-car line when I left. Got a Cleveland paper, then?”
The sarcasm was quite lost on the youthful clerk. He only gazed in a puzzled fashion at the annoyed customer and shook his head.
“There ain’t any left,” he said indifferently. “We had one this morning.”