“Nothin’, then,” says Jim.
“All right,” says Mark. “Good-by.” He walked off again, and so did Jim Root, but before Jim got to the road he turned and came back, and he was pulling a wallet out of his back pocket.
“Hey!” says he, “here’s your thirty!”
“Much obliged,” says Mark, and he turned around and winked at me. “You want to be down-town Saturday night, Mr. Root. Plunk here is goin’ to t-t-try to amuse the folks for an hour or so. I figger he’ll be all-fired funny to watch.”
“When it comes to a dicker,” says Jim, “I take off my hat to you.... You’ll start to deliverin’ to-morrow?”
“First thing,” says Mark.
We went up-stairs, and I can tell you I felt pretty foolish. I could see me traipsing around town Saturday night, with the band playing in the square, with my sister’s doll and cab, and I could come pretty close to seeing every kid in town tagging after me, making a bunch of remarks that wouldn’t do me no good to hear. I could have kicked myself in the stummick if I could have reached it with my toe. But it all did some good, I expect. It learned me a lesson, and that was not to go making bets with Mark Tidd. I might have knowed he had something ready to shoot off, and he wasn’t the kind of feller to take any chances on being made a fool of in public.
“I don’t calc’late,” says he, after a while, “that you got to worry your b-b-brain makin’ up somethin’ smart to put on that card, Plunk.”
“Looks that way,” I says, as short as I could.
Mark went over to Silas Doolittle, who was still sitting on the saw-carriage, and showed the roll of bills to him. “You can t-t-tell your men we’ll pay off prompt to-morrow night,” he says.