Hyney was adjusting a spring-heeled shoe to a broad foot at about a moment after two o’clock, when the telephone rang sharply. He dropped his client’s foot onto his own and limped to the booth. A man with an educated voice, as Mr. Hyney describes it, was asking if he might hire an automobile for the afternoon. He said he was a school inspector and was as busy as a one-eyed mouse in a cheese factory. He would come running if the buzz wagon was not busy. It was not.
Hardly had the satisfied customer walked from the store when a bearded stranger, wearing a slouch hat, stopped at the door, looked up and down the street craftily, and entered.
“Wait there,” said the shoe merchant, pointing to the central design on a piece of linoleum. “I will oil the machine and call my daughter.”
The stranger, laughing up his sleeve, through his vest and along his hatband, reached into the cash register and took fifty dollars. Then he sat down and waited until Miss Hyney came to watch the store. By this time it was hardly worth it.
An hour later the mysterious stranger told the owner of the machine to stop in front of a building in Fort Plain. He went upstairs.
Three hours later Hyney decided the stranger had given him the metropolitan fare-thee-well. He entered the build[Pg 64]ing and found nothing but the janitor and a flock of rent signs.
Two hours later he was back in Fonda, telling his daughter about the “cuss” who tore the soul out of a dandy four-hundred-dollar touring car and didn’t pay for it. Then his daughter asked him if he had taken fifty dollars from the cash register.
Mr. Hyney is in bed. But what’s the use?—he can’t sleep.
Capture Odd Pair of Mice.
A most remarkable freak of nature is a white mouse and a black one captured in a bureau drawer by John Elias, who lives in Atchison, Kan. The white mouse hasn’t a black spot on it and has black eyes. The black mouse has fur as black as the ace of spades, and its eyes are brown.