"I must say!" exclaimed the latter, strongly moved.
"I'm going to buy a beautiful present for every one," added the now fatuous giver.
"Every one!" It was all Merle could manage, and even it caused him to gulp.
"Every one," repeated the hopeless addict.
And even as he said it he was snared again, this time by an immense advertising placard propped on the counter. It hymned the virtues of the Ajax Invigorator. To the left sagged a tormented male victim of many ailments meticulously catalogued below, but in too fine print for offhand reading by one in a hurry. The frame of the sufferer was bent, upheld by a cane, one hand poignantly resting on his back. The face was drawn with pain and despair. "For twenty years I suffered untold agonies," this person was made to confess in large print. It was heartrending. But opposite the moribund wretch was a figure of rich health, erect, smartly dressed, with a full, smiling face and happy eyes. Surprisingly this was none other than the sufferer. One could hardly have believed them the same, but so it was. "The Ajax Invigorator made a new man of me," continued the legend. There were further details which seemed negligible to the philanthropist, because the pictured hero of the invigorator already suggested Judge Penniman, the ever-ailing father of Winona. The likeness was not wholly fanciful. True, the judge was not so abject as the first figure, but then he was not so obtrusively vigorous as the second.
"A bottle of that," said Wilbur, and pointed to the card.
The druggist thrust out a bottle already wrapped in a printed cover, and the price, as became a cut-rate pharmacy, proved to be ninety-eight cents.
A wish was now expressed that the advertising placard might also be taken in order that Judge Penniman might see just what sort of new man the invigorator would make of him. But this proved impracticable; the placard must remain where it stood for the behoof of other invalids. But there were smaller portraits of the same sufferer, it seemed, in the literature inclosing the bottle. It was the Merle twin who carried the purchases as they issued from the pharmacy. This was fitting, inevitable. The sodden philanthropist must have his hands free to spend more money.
They rested again at the Gumble counter—and now they were not alone. The acoustics of the small town are faultless, and the activities of this spendthrift had been noised abroad. To the twins, as two of those and two of those and one of them were being ordered, came four other boys to linger cordially by and assist in the selections. Hospitality was not gracefully avoidable. The four received candy cigars and became mere hangers-on of the rich, lost to all self-respect, fawning, falsely solicitous, brightly expectant. Chocolate mice were next distributed. The four guests were now so much of the party as to manifest quick hostility to a fifth boy who had beamingly essayed to be numbered among them. They officiously snubbed and even covertly threatened this fifth boy, who none the less lingered very determinedly by the host, and was presently rewarded with sticky largesse; whereupon he was accepted by the four, and himself became hostile to another aspirant.
But mere candy began to cloy—Solly Gumble had opened the second box of chocolate mice—and the host even abandoned his reënforced lemon, which was promptly communized by the group. He tried to think of something to eat that wouldn't be candy, whereupon mounted in his mind the pyramid of watermelons a block down the street before the Bon Ton Grocery.