ple pullin' guns on me.

"So, then, there was a drug store goin' in no time. Both me and
Hadds was happy as could be, and workin' like a pair of mules.
When we had things fixed, and a sign 'Hadds & Scraggs' in gold
letters four foot high, I felt I really was a prominent citizen.
But dear friends and brothers, always there's somebody handy with a
fly to stick in your ointment. Once I went down street to see how
that sign looked a little ways off, and up rides a puncher.

"'Hadds & Scraggs!' says he: 'I wonder what kind of merchandise
them is? Well, I must take a Hadds and a Scraggs home to show the
boys.'

"He knocked every bit of poetry out of that sign. Howsomever,
poetry ain't the chief business of a drug store, and when you come
to the practical side we done mighty well. We got in a line of
patent medicines with pretty red and blue labels that took the
popular taste. As there was a minin' boom over the hill, our line
of gold pans and gunpowder went well. A new seeder brought in some
money, and with rubber boots, snowshoes, baseballs, carpenters'
tools, spectacles, lumber, and an agency for a self-binder as side
issues, I see myself getting on in the world.

"'Tweren't long before nobody'd think of buyin' a faro layout or a
deck of cards elsewhere than at our store, and as for perfumed soap
and perfumery, why, I think our feller-citizens must have et the
one and drunk the other, for we unloaded by the box and pailful.
When we'd count the kitty nights, 'Didn't I tell you?' Hadds would
holler. 'Put your feet in my tracks and you'll wear diamonds!'

"And I guess I would if it hadn't been for a lady. There's a woman
in it, nine times out of ten, when a man's ruined; and the other
time there's a man in it. If neither one nor t'other's in it it's
a durned uninterestin' occurrence, anyhow. Yes, sir; we come under
the double-cross kindness of a female major.

"One night--Sufferin' Ichabod! but that was a night.'--we were
jerried to a standstill in one half-hour, or thirty minutes, by the
clock.

"Things was slack this evening nobody in the store but Hadds, Keno
Jim and me, throwin' poker dice for cigars, when the door opens and
here come Major Pumpey and his wife from the army post. We were
not glad to see the Major. He was a little, pussy, red-faced,
pop-eyed man, pompous as a banty rooster, with black whiskers and a
mustache like a cat. He had a voice on him like barrels rolling in
a brewery vault.