“Good bookstore in that town, you bet. Buy plenty everything there. That one darn good town. You smoke cigar, maybe.”
“Not a cigar, Mick—but I often wonder if cigarettes still taste as good as they used to.”
“You like fat cigarette or little thin feller, hey? Doc Smith smoke the fat feller an’ Doc Willard don’t smoke nothin’ but eat whole lot.”
“Books, cigarettes and two doctors!—it sounds like a city! But still I haven’t any money.”
“That a’ right. You smoke him fat or thin, hey?”
“What about a little package of fat ones, Santa Claus? And I’ll write down the name of a few books.”
Mick went away with his rifle on his shoulder and a few slices of bread and cold pork in his pockets. He arrived home an hour before sundown of the following day with a pack on his tough old back as big as the hump on a camel.
“Buy all I kin tote,” he said, as Tom helped him ease the load to the snow. “Take two-three a’mighty strong feller to tote what I got plenty ’nough money for to buy, you bet.”
They examined the pack after supper, by the light of candles which it had contained. Here were cakes of tobacco, a small jug of molasses, bacon, salt pork, a copy of Staunton’s “Chess,” a copy of Stevenson’s “Black Arrow,” and a well-thumbed romance by Maurice Hewlett named “Forest Lovers.” Also, here were cigarettes, a razor, a shaving-brush, sticks and cakes of soap, rifle ammunition and a green and red necktie of striking design.
“Give him Gaspar’ for Chrismus,” said Mick Otter, holding the tie aloft. “He shine right through Gaspar’s whiskers, what?”