“I don't suppose it is worth the paper it is written on,” said Rosenstein, with his melancholy accent, frowning intellectually over the slip of paper.
“He gave the dressmaker one, too,” said Amidon, “and she is tickled to death with it. The daughter had already asked her to take back a silk dress she had made for her, and she has sold it for something. The dressmaker thinks the note is as good as money.”
“I've got one of the blasted things, too,” said the milkman, Tappan.
“It's for forty dollars, and I'll sell out for ten cents.”
“I'd be willing to make my davyalfit that Captain Carroll's notes will be met when they are accentuated,” said the little barber, in a trembling voice of partisanship, looking up from the man he was shaving; and everybody laughed.
Lee, who was waiting his turn, spoke. “Captain Carroll says he will pay me the price I paid for the United Fuel stock, in a year's time,” he said, proudly. “The stock has depreciated terribly, too. A pretty square man, I call him.”
“He's got more sides than you have, anyhow,” growled Tappan, who was bristling like a pirate with his week's beard; and everybody laughed again, though they did not altogether know why.
However the recipients of Carroll's notes doubted their soundness, they folded them carefully and put them in their pocketbooks. When Carroll took the eight-o'clock train to New York the next morning, several noticed it and thought it looked well for the payment of the notes.
“Guess he's goin' to start another cheat,” said the milkman, who had stopped at the saloon opposite Rosenstein's. “I seed him git on the eight-ten train.”
Charlotte had been told by her father that he was going to New York that morning, and she had risen early and prepared what she considered a wonderful breakfast for him. She was radiant. Anderson had called upon her the evening before. She had never been so happy. Her father seemed in very good spirits, but she wondered why he looked so badly. It was actually as if he had lost ten pounds since the night before. He was horribly haggard, but he talked and laughed in a manner rather unusual for him, as he ate his breakfast. Charlotte watched jealously that he should do that. When he took his second badly fried egg, she beamed, and he concealed his physical and mental nausea.