"It's all profit," he has often said to me. "We buy nothin' an' we sell every durned thing we raise."
Then he would chuckle and rub together his yellow, wrinkled hands. Ajax said that whenever Mr. Bobo laughed it behooved other folk to look grave.
"Mandy's dress costs something," I observed.
"Considerable,--I'd misremembered that. Her rig-out las' fall cost me the vally o' three boxes o' apples--winter pearmains!"
"She will marry soon, Mr. Bobo."
"An' leave me?" he cried shrilly. "I'd like to see a man prowlin' around my Mandy--I'd stimilate him. Besides, mister, Mandy ain't the marryin' kind. She's homely as a mud fence, is Mandy. She ain't put up right for huggin' and kissin'."
"But she is your heiress, Mr. Bobo."
"Heiress," he repeated with a cunning leer. "I'm poor, mister, poor. The tax collector has eat me up--eat me up, I say, eat me up!"
He looked such an indigestible morsel, so obviously unfit for the maw of even a tax collector, that I laughed and took my leave. He was worth, I had reason to know, at least fifty thousand dollars.
* * * * *