mething to give it
the final touch of style dear to the country youth.

Scattergood got up, and ambled into his store, returning with a
resplendent buggy whip--one with a white silk bow tied above its handle.
This he placed in the socket on the dashboard. Then he resumed his
chair. Presently Jim emerged with his girl and helped her into the rig.
He noticed the whip, took it out of its place, and examined it; swished
it through the air to try its excellence.

"Mighty nice gad," said Scattergood.

"Where in tunket did it come from?" asked Jim.

"I stuck it there. Looked to me like a rig sich as your'n needed a good
whip to set it off. I jest put it there to see how it looked."

Jim glanced at his girl, scratched the back of his suntanned neck, and
felt in his pocket.

"Calc'late I _did_ need a whip," he said. "How much is sich whips
fetchin'?"

"I kin give you that one a might lower 'n usual. It'll be two dollars to
you, seem's you got sich a purty girl in the buggy."

The girl giggled, Jim flushed, and fished out two one-dollar bills,
which he passed over to Scattergood. Then, whip in hand, he drove off
with a flourish. Scattergood pocketed the money serenely. It was by
methods such as this that he did, in his hardware store, double the
business such a store in such a locality normally accounted for.
Scattergood's most outstanding quality was that he never let a business
opportunity slip--large or small--and that he manufactured for himself
fully half of his business opportunities. He had lifted retail
salesmanship to the rank of an art.

Again he got up and went inside, where he wrote a letter to a certain
wholesale house with whom his account was large. The letter said he had
pressing need for half a dozen railroad rails of certain size and
weight, and didn't know where to get them, and would the recipient find
them and ship them at once.

Presently Tim Plant, teamster, drove by, and Scattergood hailed him.

"Tim," he said, "you owe me a leetle bill. This hain't a dun, but I got
a mite of work to be done, and seein' things wasn't brisk with you, I
figgered you might want to work it out--jest to keep busy."

"Sure," said Tim.

Whereupon Scattergood elevated himself to the seat beside Tim, and was
driven to the spot he had selected for the Coldriver terminal of his
railroad.

"I want about a hunderd feet graded along here," he said, "to lay rails
on."

"Rails!... Gosh! Scattergood, you hain't thinkin'