Pole carried the discussion no further. Half an hour passed. Customers were coming in from the wagon-yard and examining the wares on the counters and making slow purchases. The proprietor came in and let the clerk go to breakfast. Pole stood in the doorway, looking up the street in the direction of Craig's residence. Presently he saw the ex-banker coming from the post-office, reading his mail. Pole stepped back into the store and let him go by; then he went to the door again and saw Craig go into Fincher's warehouse at the end of the next block of straggling, wooden buildings. Pole sauntered down the sidewalk in that direction, passing the front door of the warehouse without looking in. The door at the side of the house had a long platform before it, and on it Fincher, the proprietor, was weighing bales of hay which were being unloaded from several wagons by the countrymen who were disposing of it.
“Hello, Mr. Fincher,” Pole greeted him, familiarly. “Want any help unloadin'?”
“Hello, Baker,” said Fincher, looking up from the blank-book in which he was recording the weights. “No, I reckon they can handle it all right.” Fincher was a short, fat man, very bald, and with a round, laughing face. He had known Pole a long time and considered him a most amusing character. “How do you come on, Pole?”
“Oh, about as common. I jest thought them fellers looked sorter light-weight.”
The men on the wagon laughed as they thumped a bale of hay on to the platform. “You'd better dry up,” one of them said. “We 'll git the mayor to put you to work agin.”
“Well, he 'll have to be quicker about it than he was the last time,” said Pole, dryly.
Some one laughed lustily from behind a tall stack of wheat in bags in the warehouse. It was Lawyer Trabue. He came round and picked up Fincher's daily paper, as he did every morning, and sat down and began to read it.
“Now you are talkin',” he said. “Thar was more rest in that job, Pole, than any you ever undertook. They tell me you didn't crack a rock.”
Fincher laughed as he closed his book and struck Baker with it playfully. “Pole was too tired to do that job,” he said. “He was born that way.”
“Say, Mr. Trabue,” retaliated Pole, “did you ever heer how I got the best o' Mr. Fincher in a chicken trade?”