“Tell ’em nothing. They’ll come running in here to find out what it’s all about, Mr. Vose. Don’t even tell ’em who wants ’em. You and I both know how curiosity itches in this town till it has been properly scratched.”
“Guess you’re right,” agreed the landlord. “If you set out to hire ’em regular style they’d want to hem and haw and haggle about so long and so much!”
“If you want a deposit for—” I suggested, reaching toward a breast pocket which was empty.
“Godfrey domino, no!” he protested, flapping his hands. “If you have had to handle business in those suspicious ways down in the city I’m sorry for you. Now forget money talk between us till it’s time to talk.”
I was glad to do that, and I hoped that his ideas of time were liberal.
I borrowed some blank paper and went up to my room and figured for many hours, stopping only to eat a good dinner—a boiled dinner in Vose’s best style. My plate was piled high twice with corned beef fringed with golden fat, succulent disks of yellow carrots, wine-red beets, snowy white spuds, and odorous turnips. No man could possibly be a pessimist with that dinner under his belt! I had every reason to be the most apprehensive man in Avon County, but I had set my face to the front and I had just naturally made up my mind that I was going to pay for that dinner and for the other things which I had been recklessly ordering. I proposed to put myself into a position where I would be compelled to use every bit of my capital of cheek. The sweat stood, out on my forehead, but it wasn’t the kind of moisture which could soften my grit.
In the afternoon, every time a steaming horse came homing back to Vose’s stable, I felt a funny quiver inside me.
“I reckon you have got a good line on human nature, young Sidney,” stated the landlord, when I went down to the foreroom before supper. “From what the men say this rushing around back district’s with teams has got the boys all heifered up. Even if they don’t come in to go to work, they’ll be here to see what in tunket the hoorah’s about.”
“I have heard my father say that this town was always ready to turn out to a bee,” I told him. When I said it another thought came to cheer me—I had noticed that when a lot of men were set at work together on one job the natural spirit of rivalry put pep into the bunch.
When Dodovah Vose went to his kitchen to give an eye to supper, I plucked a telegraph blank from his office desk. I nerved myself to try on my most audacious trick of all. I wrote this: