"What's wrong?" I asked. "Is the world comin' to an end?"
He put one hand to his head and waved the other up and down like a pump handle.
"Yes," he sings out, frantic like. "It is ended already. It is all over. I—I—"
And with that he jumps off the platform and goes staggerin' up the road. I'd have follered him, but just then Jim Henry calls to me from inside the store and in a little while I'd forgot Beanblossom altogether. I thought of him once or twice durin' the day, but 'twa'n't till about shuttin'-up time that I thought enough to mention him to Jacobs. Then he mentioned him fust.
"Whew!" says he, settin' down for the fust time in two hours. "Whew! I'm tired. This has been the best day this concern has had since I took hold of it, and I've worked like a perpetual motion machine. We'll need another boy pretty soon, Skipper. Pullet's no good as a salesman. By the way, where is Pullet? I ain't seen him since noon."
Neither had I, now that I come to think of it.
"I wonder if the poor critter's sick," I says. Then I started to tell how queer he'd acted out on the platform. I'd just begun when Amos Hallett's boy come into the store with a note.
"It's for you, Cap'n Zeb," he says, all out of breath. "I meant to give it to you afore, but I just this minute remembered it. Mr. Beanblossom, he give it to me at the depot when he took the up train."
"Took the up train?" says I. "Who did? Not Pul—Mr. Beanblossom?"
"Yes," says the boy. "He's gone to Boston, leastways the depot-master said he bought a ticket for there. Why? Didn't you know it? He—"