“Then you desert Miss Sally,” she repeated sadly.
“Mrs. Smith.” Said Eliph', reaching into his pocket and laying a handful of thick greasy manila envelopes in her lap, “these are my bank books. Six, containing the sum of seventeen thousand four hundred and eighty-two dollars and forty-six cents, and all this I lay at Miss Sally's feet if I do not succeed in selling a copy of Jarby's Encyclopedia this afternoon. If sold, the matter is settled.”
When Eliph' reached the business part of Main Street he turned into Skinner's butcher shop and halted at the counter. The butcher was at work in the back room, and he put his head out and, seeing who had called, shook it.
“No books,” he said shortly. “I never buy books. I didn't buy them Sir Walter Scotts even. No books.”
Eliph' coughed his deprecatory little cough and walked behind the counter and to the door of the back room.
“So I understood,” he said. “I heard at Franklin that you didn't buy books; it was mentioned to me that I would be wasting my time in calling on you. They said you was known all over the State as not buying books, and many admired your self-restraint in not buying. They said it was wonderful. That's why I never called on you to buy. But I didn't come to sell you a book. I wanted to ask if you knew William Rossiter?”
“William Rossiter?” asked Skinner, perplexed, coming out of the back room. “Who's William Rossiter?”
Eliph' laid his book on the chopping block.
“William Rossiter, agent,” he said. “He was here once. He was the man that stopped with Miss Sally Briggs a while. I thought maybe you knew him. He's dead. I thought maybe you'd be interested to know it.”
A light dawned on the butcher. William Rossiter must have been the man that left the lung-testers at Miss Sally's.