“Let me try it,” caroled Mr. Wrenn, and pounded the lever with the enthusiasm of comradeship.
“Nothing doing, lady,” crowed the fat man to the cashier.
“I guess I draw two boxes, too, eh? And I’m in a cigar-store. How’s that for stinging your competitors, heh? Ho, ho, ho!”
The cashier handed him two boxes, with an embarrassed simper, and the fat man clapped Mr. Wrenn’s shoulder joyously.
“My turn!” shouted a young man in a fuzzy green hat and a bright-brown suit, who had been watching with the sudden friendship which unites a crowd brought together by an accident.
Mr. Wrenn was glowing. “No, it ain’t—it’s mine,” he achieved. “I invented this game.” Never had he so stood forth in a crowd. He was a Bill Wrenn with the cosmopolitan polish of a floor-walker. He stood beside the fat man as a friend of sorts, a person to be taken perfectly seriously.
It is true that he didn’t add to this spiritual triumph the triumph of getting two more boxes of matches, for the cashier-girl exclaimed, “No indeedy; it’s my turn!” and lifted the match machine to a high shelf behind her. But Mr. Wrenn went out of the restaurant with his old friend, the fat man, saying to him quite as would a wit, “I guess we get stung, eh?”
“Yuh!” gurgled the fat man.
Walking down to your store?”
“Yuh—sure—won’t you walk down a piece?”