It was not until the mining boom, at the time when everybody went simply
crazy over the Cobalt and Porcupine mines of the new silver country near
the Hudson Bay, that Jefferson Thorpe reached what you might call public
importance in Mariposa.
Of course everybody knew Jeff and his little barber shop that stood just
across the street from Smith's Hotel. Everybody knew him and everybody
got shaved there. From early morning, when the commercial travellers off
the 6.30 express got shaved into the resemblance of human beings, there
were always people going in and out of the barber shop.
Mullins, the manager of the Exchange Bank, took his morning shave from
Jeff as a form of resuscitation, with enough wet towels laid on his face
to stew him and with Jeff moving about in the steam, razor in hand, as
grave as an operating surgeon.
Then, as I think I said, Mr. Smith came in every morning and there was
a tremendous outpouring of Florida water and rums, essences and revivers
and renovators, regardless of expense. What with Jeff's white coat and
Mr. Smith's flowered waistcoat and the red geranium in the window and
the Florida water and the double extract of hyacinth, the little shop
seemed multi-coloured and luxurious enough for the annex of a Sultan's
harem.
But what I mean is that, till the mining boom, Jefferson Thorpe never
occupied a position of real prominence in Mariposa. You couldn't, for
example, have compared him with a man like Golgotha Gingham, who,
as undertaker, stood in a direct relation to life and death, or to
Trelawney, the postmaster, who drew money from the Federal Government of
Canada, and was regarded as virtually a member of the Dominion Cabinet.
Everybody knew Jeff and liked him, but the odd thing was that till he
made money nobody took any stock in his ideas at all. It was only after
he made the "clean up" that they came to see what a splendid fellow
he was. "Level-headed" I think was the term; indeed in the speech of
Mariposa, the highest form of endowment was to have the head set on
horizontally as with a theodolite.
As I say, it was when Jeff made money that they saw how gifted he was,
and when he lost it,--but still, there's no need to go into that. I
believe it's something the same in other places too.
The barber shop, you will remember, stands across the street from
Smith's Hotel, and stares at it face to face.
It is one of those wooden structures--I don't know whether you know
them--with a false front that sticks up above its real height and gives
it an air at once rectangular and imposing. It is a form of architecture
much used in Mariposa and understood to be in keeping with the
pretentious and artificial character of modern business. There is a red,
white and blue post in front of the shop and the shop itself has a large
square window out of proportion to its little flat face.
Painted on the panes of the window is the remains of a legend that once
spelt BARBER SHOP, executed with the flourishes that prevailed in the
golden age of sign painting in Mariposa. Through the window you can see
the geraniums in the window shelf and behind them Jeff Thorpe with his
little black scull cap on and his spectacles drooped upon his nose as he
bends forward in the absorption of shaving.
As you open the door, it sets in violent agitation a coiled spring up
above and a bell that almost rings. Inside, there are two shaving chairs
of the heavier, or electrocution pattern, with mirrors in front of them
and pigeon holes with individual shaving mugs. There must be ever so
many of them, fifteen or sixteen. It is the current supposition of each
of Jeff's customers that everyone else but himself uses a separate mug.
One corner of the shop is partitioned off and bears the sign: HOT AND
COLD BATHS, 50 CENTS. There has been no bath inside the partition for
twenty years--only old newspapers and a mop. Still, it lends distinction
somehow, just as do the faded cardboard signs that hang against the
mirror with the legends: TURKISH SHAMPOO, 75 CENTS, and ROMAN MASSAGE,
$1.00.
They said commonly in Mariposa that Jeff made money out of the barber
shop. He may have, and it may have been that that turned his mind to
investment. But it's hard to see how he could. A shave cost five cents,
and a hair-cut fifteen (or the two, if you liked, for a quarter), and
at that it is hard to see how he could make money, even when he had both
chairs going and shaved first in one and then in the other.
You see, in Mariposa, shaving isn't the hurried, perfunctory thing that
it is in the city. A shave is looked upon as a form of physical pleasure
and lasts anywhere from twenty-five minutes to three-quarters of an
hour.
In the morning hours, perhaps, there was a semblance of haste about it,
but in the long quiet of the afternoon, as Jeff leaned forward towards
the customer, and talked to him in a soft confidential monotone, like a
portrait painter, the razor would go slower and slower, and pause and
stop, move and pause again, till the shave died away into the mere
drowse of conversation.
At such hours, the Mariposa barber shop would become a very Palace of
Slumber, and as you waited your turn in one of the wooden arm-chairs
beside the wall, what with the quiet of the hour, and the low drone of
Jeff's conversation, the buzzing of the flies against the window pane
and the measured tick of the clock above the mirror, your head sank
dreaming on your breast, and the Mariposa Newspacket rustled unheeded on
the floor. It makes one drowsy just to think of it!
The conversation, of course, was the real charm of the place. You see,
Jefferson's forte, or specialty, was information. He could tell you more
things within the compass of a half-hour's shave than you get in days
of laborious research in an encyclopaedia. Where he got it all, I
don't know, but I am inclined to think it came more or less out of the
newspapers.
In the city, people never read the newspapers, not really, only little
bits and scraps of them. But in Mariposa it's different. There they read
the whole thing from cover to cover, and they build up on it, in
the course of years, a range of acquirement that would put a college
president to the blush. Anybody who has ever heard Henry Mullins and
Peter Glover talk about the future of China will know just what I mean.
And, of course, the peculiarity of Jeff's conversation was that he could
suit it to his man every time. He had a kind of divination about it.
There was a certain kind of man that Jeff would size up sideways as
he stropped the razor, and in whose ear he would whisper: "I see where
Saint Louis has took four straight games off Chicago,"--and so hold him
fascinated to the end.
In the same way he would say to Mr. Smith: "I see where it says that
this 'Flying Squirl' run a dead heat for the King's Plate."
To a humble intellect like mine he would explain in full the relations
of the Keesar to the German Rich Dog.
But first and foremost, Jeff's specialty in the way of conversation
was finance and the money market, the huge fortunes that a man with the
right kind of head could make.
I've known Jefferson to pause in his shaving with the razor suspended
in the air as long as five minutes while he described, with his eye
half closed, exactly the kind of a head a man needed in order to make
a "haul" or a "clean up." It was evidently simply a matter of the head,
and as far as one could judge, Jeff's own was the very type required.
I don't know just at what time or how Jefferson first began his
speculative enterprises. It was probably in him from the start. There
is no doubt that the very idea of such things as Traction Stock and
Amalgamated Asbestos went to his head: and whenever he spoke of Mr.
Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, the yearning tone of his voice made it as
soft as lathered soap.
I suppose the most rudimentary form of his speculation was the hens.
That was years ago. He kept them out at the back of his house,--which
itself stood up a grass plot behind and beyond the barber shop,--and in
the old days Jeff would say, with a certain note of pride in his voice,
that The Woman had sold as many as two dozen eggs in a day to the summer
visitors.
But what with reading about Amalgamated Asbestos and Consolidated Copper
and all that, the hens began to seem pretty small business, and, in
any case, the idea of two dozen eggs at a cent apiece almost makes one
blush. I suppose a good many of us have felt just as Jeff did about our
poor little earnings. Anyway, I remember Jeff telling me one day that
he could take the whole lot of the hens and sell them off and crack
the money into Chicago wheat on margin and turn it over in twenty-four
hours. He did it too. Only somehow when it was turned over it came
upside down on top of the hens.
After that the hen house stood empty and The Woman had to throw away
chicken feed every day, at a dead loss of perhaps a shave and a half.
But it made no difference to Jeff, for his mind had floated away already
on the possibilities of what he called "displacement" mining on the
Yukon.
So you can understand that when the mining boom struck Mariposa,
Jefferson Thorpe was in it right from the very start. Why, no wonder; it
seemed like the finger of Providence. Here was this great silver country
spread out to north of us, where people had thought there was only a
wilderness. And right at our very doors! You could see, as I saw, the
night express going north every evening; for all one knew Rockefeller or
Carnegie or anyone might be on it! Here was the wealth of Calcutta, as
the Mariposa Newspacket put it, poured out at our very feet.
So no wonder the town went wild! All day in the street you could
hear men talking of veins, and smelters and dips and deposits and
faults,--the town hummed with it like a geology class on examination
day. And there were men about the hotels with mining outfits and
theodolites and dunnage bags, and at Smith's bar they would hand chunks
of rock up and down, some of which would run as high as ten drinks to
the pound.
The fever just caught the town and ran through it! Within a fortnight
they put a partition down Robertson's Coal and Wood Office and opened
the Mariposa Mining Exchange, and just about every man on the Main
Street started buying scrip. Then presently young Fizzlechip, who had
been teller in Mullins's Bank and that everybody had thought a worthless
jackass before, came back from the Cobalt country with a fortune, and
loafed round in the Mariposa House in English khaki and a horizontal
hat, drunk all the time, and everybody holding him up as an example of
what it was possible to do if you tried.
They all went in. Jim Eliot mortgaged the inside of the drug store and
jammed it into Twin Tamagami. Pete Glover at the hardware store bought
Nippewa stock at thirteen cents and sold it to his brother at seventeen
and bought it back in less than a week at nineteen. They didn't care!
They took a chance. Judge Pepperleigh put the rest of his wife's money
into Temiskaming Common, and Lawyer Macartney got the fever, too, and
put every cent that his sister possessed into Tulip Preferred.
And even when young Fizzlechip shot himself in the back room of the
Mariposa House, Mr. Gingham buried him in a casket with silver handles
and it was felt that there was a Monte Carlo touch about the whole
thing.
They all went in--or all except Mr. Smith. You see, Mr. Smith had come
down from there, and he knew all about rocks and mining and canoes and
the north country. He knew what it was to eat flour-baked dampers under
the lee side of a canoe propped among the underbrush, and to drink the
last drop of whiskey within fifty miles. Mr. Smith had mighty little use
for the north. But what he did do, was to buy up enough early potatoes
to send fifteen carload lots into Cobalt at a profit of five dollars a
bag.
Mr. Smith, I say, hung back. But Jeff Thorpe was in the mining boom
right from the start. He bought in on the Nippewa mine even before the
interim prospectus was out. He took a "block" of 100 shares of
Abbitibbi Development at fourteen cents, and he and Johnson, the livery
stablekeeper next door, formed a syndicate and got a thousand shares
of Metagami Lake at 3 1/4 cents and then "unloaded" them on one of the
sausage men at Netley's butcher shop at a clear cent per cent advance.
Jeff would open the little drawer below the mirror in the barber
shop and show you all kinds and sorts of Cobalt country mining
certificates,--blue ones, pink ones, green ones, with outlandish and
fascinating names on them that ran clear from the Mattawa to the Hudson
Bay.
And right from the start he was confident of winning. "There ain't no
difficulty to it," he said, "there's lots of silver up there in that
country and if you buy some here and some there you can't fail to come
out somewhere. I don't say," he used to continue, with the scissors open
and ready to cut, "that some of the greenhorns won't get bit. But if a
feller knows the country and keeps his head level, he can't lose."
Jefferson had looked at so many prospectuses and so many pictures of
mines and pine trees and smelters, that I think he'd forgotten that he'd
never been in the country. Anyway, what's two hundred miles!
To an onlooker it certainly didn't seem so simple. I never knew the
meanness, the trickery, of the mining business, the sheer obstinate
determination of the bigger capitalists not to make money when they
might, till I heard the accounts of Jeff's different mines. Take the
case of Corona Jewel. There was a good mine, simply going to ruin for
lack of common sense.
"She ain't been developed," Jeff would say. "There's silver enough in
her so you could dig it out with a shovel. She's full of it. But they
won't get at her and work her."
Then he'd take a look at the pink and blue certificates of the Corona
Jewel and slam the drawer on them in disgust. Worse than that was
the Silent Pine,--a clear case of stupid incompetence! Utter lack of
engineering skill was all that was keeping the Silent Pine from making a
fortune for its holders.
"The only trouble with that mine," said Jeff, "is they won't go deep
enough. They followed the vein down to where it kind o' thinned out and
then they quit. If they'd just go right into her good, they'd get it
again. She's down there all right."
But perhaps the meanest case of all was the Northern Star. That always
seemed to me, every time I heard of it, a straight case for the criminal
law. The thing was so evidently a conspiracy.
"I bought her," said Jeff, "at thirty-two, and she stayed right there
tight, like she was stuck. Then a bunch of these fellers in the city
started to drive her down and they got her pushed down to twenty-four,
and I held on to her and they shoved her down to twenty-one. This
morning they've got her down to sixteen, but I don't mean to let go. No,
sir."
In another fortnight they shoved her, the same unscrupulous crowd, down
to nine cents, and Jefferson still held on. "They're working her down,"
he admitted, "but I'm holding her."
No conflict between vice and virtue was ever grimmer.
"She's at six," said Jeff, "but I've got her. They can't squeeze me."
A few days after that, the same criminal gang had her down further than
ever.
"They've got her down to three cents," said Jeff, "but I'm with her.
Yes, sir, they think they can shove her clean off the market, but
they can't do it. I've boughten in Johnson's shares, and the whole of
Netley's, and I'll stay with her till she breaks."
So they shoved and pushed and clawed her down--that unseen nefarious
crowd in the city--and Jeff held on to her and they writhed and twisted
at his grip, and then--
And then--well, that's just the queer thing about the mining business.
Why, sudden as a flash of lightning, it seemed, the news came over the
wire to the Mariposa Newspacket, that they had struck a vein of silver
in the Northern Star as thick as a sidewalk, and that the stock had
jumped to seventeen dollars a share, and even at that you couldn't get
it! And Jeff stood there flushed and half-staggered against the mirror
of the little shop, with a bunch of mining scrip in his hand that was
worth forty thousand dollars!
Excitement! It was all over the town in a minutes. They ran off a news
extra at the Mariposa Newspacket, and in less than no time there wasn't
standing room in the barber shop, and over in Smith's Hotel they had
three extra barkeepers working on the lager beer pumps.
They were selling mining shares on the Main Street in Mariposa that
afternoon and people were just clutching for them. Then at night there
was a big oyster supper in Smith's caff, with speeches, and the Mariposa
band outside.
And the queer thing was that the very next afternoon was the funeral
of young Fizzlechip, and Dean Drone had to change the whole text of
his Sunday sermon at two days' notice for fear of offending public
sentiment.
But I think what Jeff liked best of it all was the sort of public
recognition that it meant. He'd stand there in the shop, hardly
bothering to shave, and explain to the men in the arm-chairs how he held
her, and they shoved her, and he clung to her, and what he'd said to
himself--a perfect Iliad--while he was clinging to her.
The whole thing was in the city papers a few days after with a
photograph of Jeff, taken specially at Ed Moore's studio (upstairs over
Netley's). It showed Jeff sitting among palm trees, as all mining men
do, with one hand on his knee, and a dog, one of those regular mining
dogs, at his feet, and a look of piercing intelligence in his face that
would easily account for forty thousand dollars.
I say that the recognition meant a lot to Jeff for its own sake. But no
doubt the fortune meant quite a bit to him too on account of Myra.
Did I mention Myra, Jeff's daughter? Perhaps not. That's the
trouble with the people in Mariposa; they're all so separate and so
different--not a bit like the people in the cities--that unless you hear
about them separately and one by one you can't for a moment understand
what they're like.
Myra had golden hair and a Greek face and would come bursting through
the barber shop in a hat at least six inches wider than what they
wear in Paris. As you saw her swinging up the street to the Telephone
Exchange in a suit that was straight out of the Delineator and brown
American boots, there was style written all over her,--the kind of
thing that Mariposa recognised and did homage to. And to see her in the
Exchange,--she was one of the four girls that I spoke of,--on her high
stool with a steel cap on,--jabbing the connecting plugs in and out
as if electricity cost nothing--well, all I mean is that you could
understand why it was that the commercial travellers would stand round
in the Exchange calling up all sorts of impossible villages, and
waiting about so pleasant and genial!--it made one realize how naturally
good-tempered men are. And then when Myra would go off duty and Miss
Cleghorn, who was sallow, would come on, the commercial men would be off
again like autumn leaves.
It just shows the difference between people. There was Myra who treated
lovers like dogs and would slap them across the face with a banana skin
to show her utter independence. And there was Miss Cleghorn, who was
sallow, and who bought a forty cent Ancient History to improve herself:
and yet if she'd hit any man in Mariposa with a banana skin, he'd have
had her arrested for assault.
Mind you, I don't mean that Myra was merely flippant and worthless. Not
at all. She was a girl with any amount of talent. You should have heard
her recite "The Raven," at the Methodist Social! Simply genius! And when
she acted Portia in the Trial Scene of the Merchant of Venice at the
High School concert, everybody in Mariposa admitted that you couldn't
have told it from the original.
So, of course, as soon as Jeff made the fortune, Myra had her
resignation in next morning and everybody knew that she was to go to
a dramatic school for three months in the fall and become a leading
actress.
But, as I said, the public recognition counted a lot for Jeff. The
moment you begin to get that sort of thing it comes in quickly enough.
Brains, you know, are recognized right away. That was why, of course,
within a week from this Jeff received the first big packet of stuff from
the Cuban Land Development Company, with coloured pictures of Cuba,
and fields of bananas, and haciendas and insurrectos with machetes and
Heaven knows what. They heard of him, somehow,--it wasn't for a modest
man like Jefferson to say how. After all, the capitalists of the world
are just one and the same crowd. If you're in it, you're in it, that's
all! Jeff realized why it is that of course men like Carnegie or
Rockefeller and Morgan all know one another. They have to.
For all I know, this Cuban stuff may have been sent from Morgan himself.
Some of the people in Mariposa said yes, others said no. There was no
certainty.
Anyway, they were fair and straight, this Cuban crowd that wrote to
Jeff. They offered him to come right in and be one of themselves. If a
man's got the brains, you may as well recognize it straight away. Just
as well write him to be a director now as wait and hesitate till he
forces his way into it.
Anyhow, they didn't hesitate, these Cuban people that wrote to Jeff from
Cuba--or from a post-office box in New York--it's all the same thing,
because Cuba being so near to New York the mail is all distributed from
there. I suppose in some financial circles they might have been slower,
wanted guarantees of some sort, and so on, but these Cubans, you
know, have got a sort of Spanish warmth of heart that you don't see
in business men in America, and that touches you. No, they asked no
guarantee. Just send the money whether by express order or by bank draft
or cheque, they left that entirely to oneself, as a matter between Cuban
gentlemen.
And they were quite frank about their enterprise--bananas and tobacco
in the plantation district reclaimed from the insurrectos. You
could see it all there in the pictures--tobacco plants and the
insurrectos--everything. They made no rash promises, just admitted
straight out that the enterprise might realise 400 per cent. or might
conceivably make less. There was no hint of more.
So within a month, everybody in Mariposa knew that Jeff Thorpe was "in
Cuban lands" and would probably clean up half a million by New Year's.
You couldn't have failed to know it. All round the little shop there
were pictures of banana groves and the harbour of Habana, and Cubans in
white suits and scarlet sashes, smoking cigarettes in the sun and too
ignorant to know that you can make four hundred per cent. by planting a
banana tree.
I liked it about Jeff that he didn't stop shaving. He went on just
the same. Even when Johnson, the livery stable man, came in with five
hundred dollars and asked him to see if the Cuban Board of Directors
would let him put it in, Jeff laid it in the drawer and then shaved him
for five cents, in the same old way. Of course, he must have felt proud
when, a few days later, he got a letter from the Cuban people, from New
York, accepting the money straight off without a single question, and
without knowing anything more of Johnson except that he was a friend of
Jeff's. They wrote most handsomely. Any friends of Jeff's were friends
of Cuba. All money they might send would be treated just as Jeff's would
be treated.
One reason, perhaps, why Jeff didn't give up shaving was because it
allowed him to talk about Cuba. You see, everybody knew in Mariposa that
Jeff Thorpe had sold out of Cobalts and had gone into Cuban Renovated
Lands--and that spread round him a kind of halo of wealth and mystery
and outlandishness--oh, something Spanish. Perhaps you've felt it about
people that you know. Anyhow, they asked him about the climate, and
yellow fever and what the negroes were like and all that sort of thing.
"This Cubey, it appears is an island," Jeff would explain. Of
course, everybody knows how easily islands lend themselves to making
money,--"and for fruit, they say it comes up so fast you can't stop
it." And then he would pass into details about the Hash-enders and the
resurrectos and technical things like that till it was thought a wonder
how he could know it. Still, it was realized that a man with money has
got to know these things. Look at Morgan and Rockefeller and all the men
that make a pile. They know just as much as Jeff did about the countries
where they make it. It stands to reason.
Did I say that Jeff shaved in the same old way? Not quite. There was
something even dreamier about it now, and a sort of new element in the
way Jeff fell out of his monotone into lapses of thought that I, for
one, misunderstood. I thought that perhaps getting so much money,--well,
you know the way it acts on people in the larger cities. It seemed
to spoil one's idea of Jeff that copper and asbestos and banana lands
should form the goal of his thought when, if he knew it, the little shop
and the sunlight of Mariposa was so much better.
In fact, I had perhaps borne him a grudge for what seemed to me his
perpetual interest in the great capitalists. He always had some item out
of the paper about them.
"I see where this here Carnegie has give fifty thousand dollars for one
of them observatories," he would say.
And another day he would pause in the course of shaving, and almost
whisper: "Did you ever _see_ this Rockefeller?"
It was only by a sort of accident that I came to know that there was
another side to Jefferson's speculation that no one in Mariposa ever
knew, or will ever know now.
I knew it because I went in to see Jeff in his house one night. The
house,--I think I said it,--stood out behind the barber shop. You went
out of the back door of the shop, and through a grass plot with petunias
beside it, and the house stood at the end. You could see the light
of the lamp behind the blind, and through the screen door as you came
along. And it was here that Jefferson used to sit in the evenings when
the shop got empty.
There was a round table that The Woman used to lay for supper, and after
supper there used to be a chequered cloth on it and a lamp with a shade.
And beside it Jeff would sit, with his spectacles on and the paper
spread out, reading about Carnegie and Rockefeller. Near him, but away
from the table, was The Woman doing needlework, and Myra, when she
wasn't working in the Telephone Exchange, was there too with her elbows
on the table reading Marie Corelli--only now, of course, after the
fortune, she was reading the prospectuses of Dramatic Schools.
So this night,--I don't know just what it was in the paper that caused
it,--Jeff laid down what he was reading and started to talk about
Carnegie.
"This Carnegie, I bet you, would be worth," said Jeff, closing up his
eyes in calculation, "as much as perhaps two million dollars, if you was
to sell him up. And this Rockefeller and this Morgan, either of them, to
sell them up clean, would be worth another couple of million--"
I may say in parentheses that it was a favourite method in Mariposa if
you wanted to get at the real worth of a man, to imagine him clean sold
up, put up for auction, as it were. It was the only way to test him.
"And now look at 'em," Jeff went on. "They make their money and what do
they do with it? They give it away. And who do they give it to? Why, to
those as don't want it, every time. They give it to these professors and
to this research and that, and do the poor get any of it? Not a cent and
never will."
"I tell you, boys," continued Jeff (there were no boys present, but in
Mariposa all really important speeches are addressed to an imaginary
audience of boys)--"I tell you, if I was to make a million out of this
Cubey, I'd give it straight to the poor, yes, sir--divide it up into a
hundred lots of a thousand dollars each and give it to the people that
hadn't nothing."
So always after that I knew just what those bananas were being grown
for.
Indeed, after that, though Jefferson never spoke of his intentions
directly, he said a number of things that seemed to bear on them. He
asked me, for instance, one day, how many blind people it would take to
fill one of these blind homes and how a feller could get ahold of them.
And at another time he asked whether if a feller advertised for some of
these incurables a feller could get enough of them to make a showing.
I know for a fact that he got Nivens, the lawyer, to draw up a document
that was to give an acre of banana land in Cuba to every idiot in
Missinaba county.
But still,--what's the use of talking of what Jeff meant to do? Nobody
knows or cares about it now.
The end of it was bound to come. Even in Mariposa some of the people
must have thought so. Else how was it that Henry Mullins made such a
fuss about selling a draft for forty thousand on New York? And why was
it that Mr. Smith wouldn't pay Billy, the desk clerk, his back wages
when he wanted to put it into Cuba?
Oh yes; some of them must have seen it. And yet when it came it seemed
so quiet,--ever so quiet,--not a bit like the Northern Star mine and
the oyster supper and the Mariposa band. It is strange how quiet these
things look, the other way round.
You remember the Cuban Land frauds in New York and Porforio Gomez
shooting the detective, and him and Maximo Morez getting clear away with
two hundred thousand? No, of course you don't; why, even in the city
papers it only filled an inch or two of type, and anyway the names were
hard to remember. That was Jeff's money--part of it. Mullins got the
telegram, from a broker or someone, and he showed it to Jeff just as he
was going up the street with an estate agent to look at a big empty lot
on the hill behind the town--the very place for these incurables.
And Jeff went back to the shop so quiet--have you ever seen an animal
that is stricken through, how quiet it seems to move?
Well, that's how he walked.
And since that, though it's quite a little while ago, the shop's open
till eleven every night now, and Jeff is shaving away to pay back that
five hundred that Johnson, the livery man, sent to the Cubans, and--
Pathetic? tut! tut! You don't know Mariposa. Jeff has to work pretty
late, but that's nothing--nothing at all, if you've worked hard all your
lifetime. And Myra is back at the Telephone Exchange--they were glad
enough to get her, and she says now that if there's one thing she hates,
it's the stage, and she can't see how the actresses put up with it.
Anyway, things are not so bad. You see it was just at this time that
Mr. Smith's caff opened, and Mr. Smith came to Jeff's Woman and said he
wanted seven dozen eggs a day, and wanted them handy, and so the hens
are back, and more of them, and they exult so every morning over the
eggs they lay that if you wanted to talk of Rockefeller in the barber
shop you couldn't hear his name for the cackling.