cuits
from the oven and looking him over with a smile.

Curtis Morgan was a slim and limber man, with a small head and a big
mouth, a most flexible and plastic organ. Morgan wore a mustache which
was cut back to stubs, giving his face a grubby look about the nose. His
light hair was short and thick, curling in little love-locks about his
ears.

Morgan sold books. He would put you in a set of twenty-seven volumes of
the _History of the World_ for fifty-three dollars, or he would open his
valise and sell you a ready-reckoner for six bits. He carried _Household
Compendiums of Useful Knowledge_ and _Medical Advisers_; he had poultry
guides and horse books, and books on bees, and if he couldn't sell you
one thing he would sell you another, unless you were a worm, or a
greased pig, and able, by some extraordinary natural or artificial
attribute, to slip out of his hands.

As has been the case with many a greater man before him, Morgan's most
profitable business was done in his smallest article of trade. In the
country where men's lives were counted too short for all the work they
had to do, they didn't have any time for histories of the world and no
interest in them, anyhow. The world was to them no more than they could
see of it, and the needs of their lives and their longings--save in some
adventurer who developed among them now and then--went no farther than
the limit of their vision.

The ready-reckoner was, therefore, the money-maker for Morgan, who
seemed to carry an inexhaustible supply. It told a farm-hand what his
pay amounted to by days and hours down to the fraction of a cent; it
told the farmer what the interest on his note would be; it showed how to
find out how many bushels of corn there were in a crib without measuring
the contents, and how many tons of hay a stack contained; it told how to
draw up a will and write a deed, and make liniment for the mumps.

Isom drew all this information out of his guest at supper, and it did
not require much effort to set the sap flowing.

Morgan talked to Isom and looked at Ollie; he asked Joe a question, and
cocked his eye on Ollie's face as if he expected to find the answer
there; he pronounced shallow platitudes of philosophy aiming them at
Isom, but looking at Ollie for approval or dissent.

Isom appeared to take rather kindly to him, if his unusual volubility
indicated the state of his feelings. He asked Morgan a great deal about
his business, and how he liked it,