A feller had just turned the corner of the house and was heading up in our direction. He was a thin, lengthy craft, with more'n the average amount of wrists sticking out of his sleeves, and with long black hair trimmed aft behind his ears and curling on the back of his neck. He had high cheek bones and kind of sunk-in black eyes, and altogether he looked like “Dr. Macgoozleum, the Celebrated Blackfoot Medicine Man.” If he'd hollered: “Sagwa Bitters, only one dollar a bottle!” I wouldn't have been surprised.
But his clothes—don't say a word! His coat was long and buttoned up tight, so's you couldn't tell whether he had a vest on or not—though 'twas a safe bet he hadn't—and it and his pants was made of the loudest kind of black-and-white checks. No nice quiet pepper-and-salt, you understand, but the checkerboard kind, the oilcloth kind, the kind that looks like the marble floor in the Boston post-office. They was pretty tolerable seedy, and so was his hat. Oh, he was a last year's bird's nest NOW, but when them clothes was fresh—whew! the northern lights and a rainbow mixed wouldn't have been more'n a cloudy day 'longside of him.
He run up to the piazza like a clipper coming into port, and he sweeps off that rusty hat and hails us grand and easy.
“Good-morning, gentlemen,” says he.
“We don't want none,” says Jonadab, decided.
The feller looked surprised. “I beg your pardon,” says he. “You don't want any—what?”
“We don't want any 'Life of King Solomon' nor 'The World's Big Classifyers.' And we don't want to buy any patent paint, nor sewing machines, nor clothes washers, nor climbing evergreen roses, nor rheumatiz salve. And we don't want our pictures painted, neither.”
Jonadab was getting excited. Nothing riles him wuss than a peddler, unless it's a woman selling tickets to a church fair. The feller swelled up until I thought the top button on that thunderstorm coat would drag anchor, sure.
“You are mistaken,” says he. “I have called to see Mr. Peter Brown; he is—er—a relative of mine.”
Well, you could have blown me and Jonadab over with a cat's-paw. We went on our beam ends, so's to speak. A relation of Peter T.'s; why, if he'd been twice the panorama he was we'd have let him in when he said that. Loud clothes, we figgered, must run in the family. We remembered how Peter was dressed the first time we met him.