"You bet I'm all right. Lucky for him he took me unawares. Why, say, I could work around him like a copper around a barrel!"
"I bet," she said. And she smiled at him again, nodded, and skipped back into her box.
Restored to his own good opinion by her deftness, Paul swaggered back to Hepp's Bargain Basement. He knew that she had seen the episode, and that she could not have misinterpreted it; but still he had not lost face.
Hepp was waiting for him. "Where were you the last two hours?"
"Aw, I wasn't feeling right."
Hepp, a short and big-bellied man with a pink and shining head, compressed his lips. "Look here, Manley, did you make this sale?"
"Yes," said Paul, glancing at the sales-slip. "That's some of my work, Mr. Hepp!"
"I might have recognized it. You sold this pair of shoes to a colored fellow, and he left his old shoes to be sent home. Well, he was in here just now, raising Cain, and threatening to cut me. You sent him a pair of ladies' dancing pumps in the box instead of his shoes, and he says he forgot the ten dollar bill that he had hidden in his old shoe. And he wanted it!"
"Aw, he's a liar!"