“Nobody from Goldstone’ll speak up and spoil the fun, neither,” I says. “Not by a jugful! That passel of yaps down there is jealous of Briggs, and ’d just like to see her done. What’s more, they got a heap of little, mean pride, and ’d never own up they been sold.”
It was shore funny, but from that very minute, and all by itself kinda, Briggs City begun to boom! Billy Trowbridge put a barb-wire fence ’round a couple of vacant lots next his house. Bergin dug a big hole behind that ole vacant shack of hisn, and buried about a ton of tin cans. Hairoil turned some shoats into a rock patch he owned and cleaned out the rattlesnakes. And all over town, sand got five times as high as it’d ever been afore.
So when my dudey friend, the real-estate feller, struck our flourishin’ city, and hired a’ empty shanty fer his office, he didn’t find no one anxious to sell him a slice of land. “Say! property’s up here,” he remarked, whilst he put down the stiff price that Bill Rawson ’d ast fer a lot. He seemed sorta bothered in his mind. (But he had to have land–to start his game on.)
“And climbin’,” says Bill, pocketin’ the spondulix. (Later on, Bill says to me, “I ain’t a-goin’ to do another lick of hard work this year!”)
Same day, here was Sam Barnes, walkin’ up and down on that acre of hisn and holdin’ to a forked stick. Wouldn’t tell Porky why, though he hinted that whenever a forked stick dipped three times, it meant somethin’ more ’n water.
“But I ain’t got the cash to do no investigatin’,” says Sam, sad-like.
Porky got turrible interested. “Say,” he says t’ Shackleton, “what you think of that land of Barnes’s?”
“Wal,” answers Hank, “I’ll tell y’: Oncet I seen another strip that looked just like hisn on top. And it was rich in gold. It was so blamed rich in the colour that when the feller who owned it (he was as lazy as a government mule)–when that feller wanted more t’bacca, ’r some spuds, ’r a piece of pig, why, he’d just go out into the yard and roll. Then he’d hike to town, and when he’d get into the bank, he’d shake hisself–good–pick up what fell to the floor, git it weighed, and the payin’-teller would hand him out what was comin’ t’ him.”
Porky peeled his eyes. (It was plain he didn’t swaller it all.) But, after talkin’ with that real-estate feller, he hunted up Sam and bought ev’ry square inch he had. “’Cause it’s dollars to doughnuts,” he says, “that Briggs City’ll grow this way.”
“Wal, I don’t know,” says Sam. “Bergin is powerful strong in pollytics, and he figgers to git the Court House erected on the other side of town–where his wife’s got some land.”