h my fingers, fer she set in to talkin' about havin' it
moved to t'other side o' the square and rentin' it fer a barber-shop,
an' she 'lowed, too, that it would be a bang-up thing to sell to a
convict-camp to keep chain-gang prisoners in.

"As a last resort, I axed her, I did, if she thought I ought to pay her
a clean hundred per cent. profit, an' she said: 'That ain't for you to
consider at all, Mr. Woods. You must jest let your mind rest on what
_you_ are goin' to get out of it. Alf Henley's made money out of it; I
must make my part, and you can do the same. It is the way business is
run all over the world. As soon as it becomes yours, somebody may come
along and pay you a hundred for it, though you'd be a fool to let it go
even at that. You are the one man in all the world that ought to hold on
to it.' She was right, Alf. I'm tickled over the change. I feel like a
new man. You ought to have seen old Welborne's face when I told 'im I
was goin' to vacate. He swore Dixie Hart was a meddlesome hussy, an'
that she had cheated the hindsight off of me. He said she owed him an'
was behind in her pay, an' that he was goin' to fetch 'er to taw."

Henley went back to his desk. There was a flush on his brow.

"Beat to a finish, and by a girl," he mused. "Here I've been thinking I
had nothing to learn about trading, and she picks up one of my remnants
and turns it over at a hundred per cent. profit as easy as knitting a
pair of socks. If I'd lived a hundred years I'd never have thought about
that shoe-shop."

CHAPTER XVI

Henley did not see Dixie Hart till a week had elapsed. He had started to
drive over to Carlton one morning, when he passed her as she was mending
a rail-fence round one of her fields which extended down to the road.
She had on a sunbonnet and heavy gloves, and stood in a dense patch of
prickly blackberry briers which reached to her shoulders.

"That work's too hard for you," Henley greeted her cordially. "I've done
all sorts of jobs on a farm, from splitting rails to feeding a steam
thresher, and they are picnics beside what you are now at."

"I believe you are right," she smiled, as she pushed back her bonnet and
exposed her red face and neck. "But I had to do it; the pigs have rooted
away the rotten rails next to the ground under these briers and got in
to my turnips and potatoes. But I've nearly finished, thank goodness."

"I'm off for Carlton," he informed her. "I go every day or so now on
bu