“Well, well! Tramping like yours is pretty hard on the footgear, and that’s a fact! Well, well! Believe me, you’ve come to just the right store for sport shoes. We got a large line of smart new horsehide shoes. Dear me! Tut, tut, tut, tut! What a pity, the way the tramping has worn out yours—fine shoe, too, I can see that. Well, well, well, well! how it surely does wear out the shoes, this long tramping. Peter, bring a pair of those horsehide shoes for Mr. Appleby. Nice, small, aristocratic foot, Mr. Appleby. If you worked in a shoe-store you’d know how uncommon—”
“Huh! Don’t want horsehide. Try a pair o’ those pigskin shoes over there that you got a sale on.”
“Well, well, you do know what you want,” fawned the shoeman. “Those pigskins are a very fine grade of shoe, and very inexpensive, very good for tramping—”
“Yump. They’ll do.”
“Going to be with us long?” inquired the shoeman, after trying on the shoes and cursing out Peter, the adenoidic clerk, in an abstracted, hopeless manner.
“Nope.” Father was wonderfully bored and superior. Surely not this Seth Appleby but a twin of his, a weak-kneed inferior twin, had loafed in Tompkins Square and wavered through the New York slums, longing for something to do. He didn’t really mean to be curt, but his chief business in life was to get his shoes and hurry back to Mother, who was waiting for him, a mile from town, at a farm where the lordly Father had strung fence-wire and told high-colored stories for his breakfast.
The fascinated shoeman hated to let him go. The shoeman knew few celebrities, and a five-mile motor ride was his wildest adventure. But by the light of a secret lamp in the bathroom, when his wife supposed him to have gone to bed, he breathlessly read the Back o’ the Beyond Magazine, and slew pirates with a rubber sponge, and made a Turkish towel into a turban covered with quite valuable rubies, and coldly defied all the sharks in the bathtub. He was an adventurer and he felt that Father Appleby would understand his little-appreciated gallantry. He continued, “The madam with you?”
“Yump.”
“Say—uh—if I may be so bold and just suggest it, we’d be honored if you and the madam could take dinner at our house and tell us about your trip. The wife and me was talking about it just this morning. The wife said, guessed we’d have to pike out and do the same thing! Hee, hee! And Doc Schergan—fine bright man the doc, very able and cultured and educated—he’s crazy to meet you. We were talking about you just this morning—read about your heading this way, in the Indianapolis paper. Say,” he leaned forward and whispered, after a look at his clerk which ought to have exterminated that unadventurous youth—“say, is it true what they say, that you’re doing this on a ten-thousand-dollar bet?”
“Well,” and Father thawed a little, “that’s what they’re all saying, but, confidentially, and don’t let this go any further, it isn’t as much as that. This is between you and I, now.”