“And what’s that, pray?”
“He knew you had just gone on one of your crazy bouts. The law of averages informed him that you would get back to your––ahem!––sober senses in about a month’s time, when the date of your second payment would be long gone by and your precious Agreement for Sale, if 244 ever you happened to remember it again, would be simply so much waste paper. He would throw half a dozen fits, right now, if he knew you were––ahem!––compos mentis, with five days still to go to make two thousand dollars––maybe. But I’m wasting your precious time, Jim,” he continued. “Get out your pen, and ink, and paper, and get busy;––eight dime novels of thirty thousand words apiece––two hundred and forty thousand words a day for five days! Shades of Sir Walter Scott and Balzac!”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t do it, Jim;––no, not for a farm!”
And Phil went back to the smithy as Jim continued dressing, doing a little special thinking, the while, on the side.
All that day, the mystery of who painted DeRue Hannington’s horse was the talk of the town.
Several painters and paper-hangers, as they went about their business in garments that betrayed their calling, were glared at in open suspicion. The reward of one hundred dollars read very good and a sort of hidden-treasure-hunt look was in the eyes of many.
The next day blue notices instead of white were tacked to the telegraph poles and the hoardings. With DeRue Hannington’s anger and indignation, the reward had risen in the night. It now stood at five hundred dollars.
In unison, the keenness of the hunt for the perpetrator of the so-called dastardly outrage rose four hundred per cent.
Meanwhile, Jim did not go to work at the Court House as he had practically said, nor yet did he go outside. He sat quietly in his own room, smoking his pipe and reading Emerson and Professor Drummond, which, of course, was quite in keeping with the peculiarities of his temperament. He had little to say to Phil as the latter 245 dropped in to see him from time to time; and the all-absorbing topic of the town––DeRue Hannington’s big reward––seemed to interest him about as much as did the approaching dissolution of his hold on the ranch he had contracted to purchase from Rattlesnake Dalton.
Phil looked in vain for signs of diligence in the direction of stories from the pen of Captain Mayne Plunkett, and articles on the affairs of the heart by Aunt Christina.