“What next?” says I.
“A l-little advertisin’,” says he.
That afternoon he painted a lot of signs, big and little. Some were for the wagon, and Binney and Tallow were to drive it around town, banging on the drum. Others were for our windows and others were to tack up on fences. The one in our window says:
Jehoshaphat P. Skip holds a chattel mortgage on this stock. He bought it just to bust this business. He won’t give us time. Friday he’s going to seize the Bazar. Everybody come. At two o’clock. Come to see Jehoshaphat P. Skip foreclose his mortgage.
That was one sign, others were like it, but every one said something different and something that wasn’t calculated to make folks fond of Skip. All day Wednesday and all day Thursday we kept them going, inviting folks to be on hand to see the end of the Bazar.
“How do you know it’ll be at two o’clock?” says I.
Mark grinned. “I saw the sheriff,” says he, “and f-fixed it up.”
Wouldn’t that beat you? He’d thought of everything.
Friday came along just as the calendar said it would, but it seemed to us it took quite a while to do it. When you’ve got a surprise in your pocket all ready to spring, it always takes the right minute a long time to get there. In the mean time we went along just as if nothing was going to happen, and we didn’t let on to a soul what we had in pickle for Jehoshaphat. We just kept advertising the foreclosure at two o’clock Friday afternoon like it was some sort of bargain sale. It was a novelty, all right. Folks don’t usually brag about being busted, so folks took quite an interest, and we were certain to have a good crowd on hand. I guess they figured something out of the ordinary would happen. That was on account of Mark Tidd and his reputation.
Lots of folks stopped in to tell us how sorry they were and to tell us their opinion of Jehoshaphat P. Sympathy doesn’t cost a cent, so you can always get more of it than you need. But it did show that Mark had fixed things so Skip wouldn’t be the best-loved man in our county, which was something, anyhow.