Although he himself didn't seem to be much of a bargain, his proposition was.
"Five rosebushes--hic!--the very finest Talisman, to be planted on out to the highway and divide your property from the motel next door. And then all in front of the motel to the highway planted in calendulas. All for--hic!--ten dollars. You just clean the--hic! weeds out and get the land ready and I'll--hic! do the rest."
Two days later Grant had cleared out all the puncture vine, Russian thistles, and the other defiant weeds that never let up their efforts to regain the tiny percentage of territory they had lost to civilization. The wild flowers that bloomed with such mad splendor on the fields behind us stayed bashfully back where they couldn't be seen from the highway, and added nothing to the front view of our place.
Oliv Snyder appeared at the appointed time, his car loaded with boxes of plants, rose bushes, and a box of rich mountain-dug dirt which had its particular merit, he assured us, in the fact that it was "hundreds of thousands of years old."
Personally, I doubted that it was any older than any other dirt.
I raked away a few loose weeds while Mr. Snyder began digging holes in the rocky, hard ground. He paced out the distance between the holes so that the rose bushes would be properly spaced; then he placed the bushes in the holes, and poured the ancient dirt around their roots. While he worked he talked, letting drop occasionally a four or five syllable word that sounded affected and unnatural.
"Even though I am a very well educated man, and have had several books published, I have--hic!--a few little idiosyncrasies," he confessed, darting his bright, wrinkle-surrounded eyes at me.
"You're kidding!" I protested. "Surely you're too normal, too well balanced for anything like that."
"No," he said seriously. "Of course I am--hic!--exceptionally well balanced, but about even me there are--oddities, shall we say?"
"Yes, let's," I agreed.