“Nope. Can’t use that lot, Jake. Runty. H’m. Wa-a-al, guess you’d better take them farther up the street, Tunis. Edges look kind of brown. Wilty.”
Stewards from the best Chicago hotels of that day—the Sherman House, the Auditorium, the Palmer House, the Wellington, the Stratford—came to Will Talcott for their daily supplies. The grocers who catered to the well-to-do north-side families and those in the neighbourhood of fashionable Prairie Avenue on the south bought of him.
Now, in his doorway, he eyed the spare little figure that appeared before him all in rusty black, with its strained anxious face, its great deep-sunk eyes.
“DeJong, eh? Sorry to hear about your loss, ma’am. Pervus was a fine lad. No great shakes at truck farming, though. His widow, h’m? Hm.” Here, he saw, was no dull-witted farm woman; no stolid Dutch woman truckster. He went out to her wagon, tweaked the boy’s brown cheek. “Wa-al now, Mis’ DeJong, you got a right smart lot of garden stuff here and it looks pretty good. Yessir, pretty good. But you’re too late. Ten, pret’ near.”
“Oh, no!” cried Selina. “Oh, no! Not too late!” And at the agony in her voice he looked at her sharply.
“Tell you what, mebbe I can move half of ’em along for you. But stuff don’t keep this weather. Turns wilty and my trade won’t touch it . . . First trip in?”
She wiped her face that was damp and yet cold to the touch. “First—trip in.” Suddenly she was finding it absurdly hard to breathe.
He called from the sidewalk to the men within: “George! Ben! Hustle this stuff in. Half of it. The best. Send you check to-morrow, Mis’ DeJong. Picked a bad day, didn’t you, for your first day?”
“Hot, you mean?”
“Wa-al, hot, yes. But I mean a holiday like this pedlers mostly ain’t buying.”