“All right, then; we’ll drop the eggs. I was shaking hands with old friends on the lower Wabash last week and struck three slabs of cocoanut pie in three days. I’m going to make a map of the pie habits of the Hoosiers and send it out as a Copeland-Farley advertisement. I’ve been all over the State lately, and I’ve never found cocoanut pie north of Logansport, and you never find it east of Seymour going south. Down along the Ohio you can stand on hotel porches in the peach season and see thousands of acres of peaches spoiling on the trees, and you go inside and find dried-peach pie on the programme. And you have to eat it or take sliced bananas or hard chunks of canned pineapple. No wonder traveling men go wrong! I wonder at times at my own pure life!”
It was evident that they liked Jerry. They encouraged him to talk, and he passed lightly from Praxiteles, whom he had just discovered in a magazine article, to the sinfulness of the cut-price drug store, which he pronounced the greatest of commercial iniquities.
After coffee on the veranda, Eaton quietly disappeared. Then Jerry and Nan went off for a stroll, leaving Copeland and Fanny together.
“I guess that’s coming out all right,” remarked Jerry, indicating the veranda with a wave of his straw hat. “But it’s tough on Cecil. I’ve been wondering whether she knows how it’s going to hit him.”
“Oh, I hope not! But that’s something we’ll never know.”
“Of course, Cecil needn’t have done all the things he did to bring them together again. He might have let the boss go by the board. It wasn’t just money that saved the boss! it was John Cecil’s strong right arm!”
“And yours, too, Jerry! Oh, yes; I know more about it than you think I do. You helped—you did a lot to save him.”
“Well, if I did,” he admitted grudgingly, “that was Cecil, too. I’d been busy rustling for myself—never caring a hang for the other fellow—till Cecil got hold of me. I’ve wondered a good deal how he did it—a scrub like me!”
“Don’t be foolish, Jerry; it had to be in you first. But he does make people want to be different. He’s certainly affected me that way.”
“Oh, you!” he exclaimed disdainfully.