You can imagine that Jim Henry and Mary had a good deal of fun over my experience with Lot and his tribe. They joked me about it consider'ble. But I didn't mind. My foot was all right again, or nearly so, and the extension to the store had been finished and was workin' out fine. We moved the mail room way back and that give us lots of room on the main floor, and Mary had a nice clean place, with plenty of air and light, new sortin' table, new desks, and all that. As for business, we done more that summer than we had previous and it kept up surprisin' well through the winter. I was happy and satisfied and Jacobs seemed to be.
But he wa'n't. It took a whole lot to satisfy him and, by the time another spring reached us and the cottages begun to open I could see that he was gettin' fidgety. One mornin' he come back from a cruise amongst the cottagers—he always handled their trade himself—and I could see that he was about ready to bile over.
"Well," says I, "what's weighin' on your mind now? Or is it your stomach? I'm willin' to bet that I'm two pound heftier than I was afore I ate them hot biscuits at our boardin' house this mornin'; and you got away with three more'n I did. Has your ballast shifted, or what?"
He shook his head.
"Skipper," says he, "we're ruined by foreign cheap labor."
"You're right," says I. "I heard that that Dutch cook used to work in a cement factory, and them biscuits prove it."
"Nothin' doin'," he says. "My noon lunch for two years was 'Draw one with a plate of sinkers'; and when it comes to warm dough, I'm an immune. That Poquit House cook could practice on me for a week and never dent my nickel-steel digestion. No. What I'm full of just now is embroidery."
I looked at him.
"See here, Jim Henry," says I, "you've got me a mile offshore in a fog. Unless you've swallowed your napkin, I don't see—"
"There! There!" he interrupted. "It's nothin' I've swallowed, I tell you! It's somethin' I've seen that I can't swallow. I can't swallow those tan-faced, hook-nosed lace peddlers. It's only spring, yet they are thicker round here already than lumps of saleratus in those biscuit we've been talkin' about. They're separatin' perfectly good easy marks from money that belongs to us, and I'm gettin' mad. My Turkish blood's risin', and there's likely to be another Armenian massacre in this neighborhood pretty soon."