“Yes, ma’am,” says Mark. “You’ll find this Bazar always has what it advertises, and as g-g-good as it advertises.”
“I hain’t never been cheated here,” she says, “and I won’t never be cheated there. I’ll never step a foot inside that store again if it was the last place on the footstool.”
Mark began to look cheerful, and as time went along he looked more cheerful. We had a steady stream of customers—and most of them had been to the other store first. And they were mad. Skip had done his business more harm that morning than as if he’d locked up his door to shut folks out. He’d made them mad—and he’d fixed it so they were suspicious of him. Mark says if you get folks to distrusting you you might just as well shut up shop, and I guess it’s so.
By noon eight gross of our cans were gone and we were beginning to worry for fear we would run out—and we would have run out, too, if it hadn’t been for those we bought from Skip—almost a gross. They just saved our bacon. When we shut the store at six o’clock there were exactly six cans left in the house. We had made a profit of eight dollars and forty cents on our own cans, and on the one hundred and twenty-six jars we bought from Skip at two cents apiece we had cleared just one dollar—and lots of satisfaction. It was a total profit of nine dollars and forty cents instead of a loss of thirty-nine dollars and a half. And Mark Tidd had done it. With that thinking brain of his he’d got us out of the worst kind of a hole—and put Jehoshaphat P. Skip into one. He’s done a lot of things that got bigger results, but I don’t believe he ever did anything that was any smarter.
“Wish somebody’d tell Skip just what happened to him,” I says.
“Me, too,” says Binney and Tallow, and Tallow said he guessed he’d go tell Skip himself.
“No need,” says Mark, “the story’s all over town. Everybody knows by this t-time—and everybody ’ll be laughin’ at Jehoshaphat to-morrow. It hain’t a good th-thing for a b-business man to have the town laughin’ at him.”
“Humiliatin’,” says I, “and especially when he got caught in his own trap by a kid he’s ’most old enough to be granddad to.”
Mark chuckled.
“We did pretty good,” says he.