"Well that is what I thought. I'll bid you good day, ladies," and he bowed himself out.
After being shown through the house and answering innumerable questions about stave and barrel-making, and where I had formerly been in business, I left for the hotel where I found Johnny patiently waiting my return.
As I entered the hotel office he met me near the door and said:
"Johnston I'd rather have been caught stealing chickens than in that horrible predicament; don't you ever do it again."
I assured him I had no idea of ever being able to do it again, or to perpetrate a similar joke on him, even though I were ever so anxious to do so.
After it was all over he seemed to appreciate the joke, but made me all sorts of offers if I would not tell it to his wife when we got home.
I asked for the valise and he said he had paid a small boy to bring it to the hotel, and he supposed it was at the office, for he wouldn't carry it through town under any circumstances, and if those people where he called would deed him their house and lot he wouldn't again go through what he did during those few awful seconds. He said that when I began talking about the house and lot he thought at first I had either got things badly mixed up or had gone crazy; and then when he suddenly thought of himself and the predicament it had left him in, he thought he would go crazy. The very first thing he thought of was that I had up and told the same identical story that he was to tell, and that he was actually left without a sign of an excuse for calling on those people. It never occurred to him that he could possibly introduce himself as a polish vender although he fully realized that the valise had been saddled on to him; and he was sitting there in a dazed condition wondering how he should get out of a scrape when I called the lady's attention to him. And only for the fact that I mentioned him as a man with something for sale he possibly never would have came to his senses again, and would no doubt have been arrested or kicked out of the house.
I asked him why he didn't ask the lady if she didn't wish to buy instead of saying, "Madam, you don't want to buy do you?"
"Great Heavens, I was afraid as it was that she would say that she wanted to buy and if she had I would have fainted dead away."