"Does it go through on Friday?"
"Day after to-morrer, boys. I shall be out of breath by that time. Have to go home and go to bed, and put all my hosses in the old barn up on the hill. You'd all better be here then. Tell all the other boys. Have 'em all come." Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, and the bunches of keys and the small change jingled merrily, as if the Squire were making fun of the railroad, or the boys, or of his misfortunes.
"We'll all be here," said Rube. "Boys, there'll be something worth seeing, sure's you live."
They were most of them at one place or another along the track before school next morning, and at the noon recess they compared notes of the matters they had seen—men spiking down rails with big hammers, for instance, instead of glue-pots. It was a great time for a lot of boys who had never seen anything of the kind before, and Rube Hollenhouser stirred up their envy a little. He said:
"Dolf Zimmerman's been on a railroad. He told me all about it. There was an accident, too, and he'd have been killed as dead as a hammer if he'd been there."
"Dolf Zimmerman!" exclaimed a fellow who lived away at the upper end of the village. "Who cares for him? He's travelled, that's all. This railroad of ours is going to run right through Cudworth's barn. I guess he wouldn't want to be riding on it just then."
There was a general agreement with that opinion, but the boys who lived at places below Zimmerman's store all found an errand in there before the day was over. Some of them only bought a cent's worth of something, and looked at Dolf, but three or four asked him questions right out, and it was Felix McCue who got the most out of him. The Widow McCue never traded at Zimmerman's, and it was a bold thing for Felix to walk in and ask of Dolf over the counter,
"What's the price of yer bist Jayvy coffee?"
"Thirty-five cents a pound."
"That's what I wanted to know. Do yiz think it'll be any chaper after the railroad gits through the barrn?"