"Let's have it!" cried Shotwell. "Paass tin cups once mo', gen'lemen!"—tink—tink—
"March," said Champion, "if you'll excuse the personality, what's changed you so?"
John laughed and said he didn't think he was changed, but if he was he reckoned it was evolution. Which did not satisfy Shotwell, who had "quaffed, ha-ha!" till he was argumentative.
"Don't you 'scuse personal'ty 't all, March. I know wha's change' you. 'Tain't no 'sperience. You ain't been converted. You're gettin' ripe! 'S all is about it. Wha' changes green persimmons? 's nature; 'tain't 'sperience."
"Well, I'd like to know if sunshine an' frost ain't experiences," retorted Champion.
"Some experiences," laughed John, "are mighty hot sunshine, and some are mighty hard frosts." To which the two old soldiers assented with more than one sentimental sigh as the three rolled themselves in their blankets and closed their eyes.
When the survey was done they made a large colored map of everything, and John kept it in a long tin tube—what rare times he was not looking at it.
"How short-sighted most men are! They'll have lands to dispose of and yet not have maps made! How the devil do they expect ever"—etc. Sometimes he smiled to himself as he rolled the gorgeous thing up, but only as we smile at the oddities of one whom we admire.
He opened an office. It contained a mantel-piece, a desk, four chairs, a Winchester rifle, and a box of cigars. The hearth and mantel-piece were crowded with specimens of earths, ores, and building stones, and of woods precious to the dyer, the manufacturer, the joiner and the cabinet-maker. Inside the desk lay the map whenever he was, and a revolver whenever he was not—"Out. Will be back in a few minutes."
On the desk's top were more specimens, three or four fat old books from Widewood, and on one corner, by the hour, his own feet, in tight boots, when he read Washington's Letters, Story on the Constitution, or the Geology of Dixie. What interested Suez most of all was his sign. It professed no occupation. "John March." That was all it proclaimed, for a time, in gilt, on a field of blue smalts. But one afternoon when he was—"Out of town. Will be back Friday"—some Rosemont boys scratched in the smalts the tin word, Gentleman.