“My friend and fellow-citizen,” said Mr. Pearl, when I saw him again, “nothing would please me better than to sit by your fireside and enjoy all that exalts and embellishes civilized life. But, firstly, I am not decent enough; and, secondly, my clothing is fit only for the 'sacred precinks' o' my own shop, as Mr. Boggs would say; and, thirdly, I have a lot to do an' only sixteen hours a day to do it in.”
So he never came to the Mill House, and, although my mother had called twice at his shop to tell her gratitude, she had not been able to find him.
One day he gave me glad news in this manner: “How would ye like a job?”
“What kind of a job?” I inquired.
“To jerk lightnin'.”
That was his way of describing the work of an operator.
“I'd like it very much.”
“You're to take the office in Heartsdale at forty dollars a month on trial,” he said.
It staggered me—the prospect of such opulence—and that very day I began my work. I have been lucky and prospered rather handsomely since then, but I have never received a sum so enduring and massive as that which came to me at the end of every month. I always hurried home with the roll of bills and flung it into my mother's lap proudly. Oh, what a lavish hand was mine those days! About the best happiness of all my life was in the few moments of sublime generosity at the month's end when I renounced the money and saw the look in my mother's face and hurried away to my chores. And when I saw the splendor of my sister's hats and gowns, and the neatness of her shoes, and heard people speak of her beauty, I was about as happy as one may be.
I had “jerked lightning” some eight months and had become a figure in the life of Heartsdale, for I guided the flying horse of God that sped in and out of the village on its slender highway, and I was looked upon as a kind of sorcerer. Moreover, I—a boy of seventeen—received the princely income of forty dollars a month!