ight-hand side was devoted to dry goods and notions,
the left to groceries, hardware, and crockery. Henley went on to the
rear, where, by lifting a massive wooden bar from iron sockets, he
opened a door in one side of the house. Next he took up a water-pail
from an inverted soap-box, and, emptying the contents, he went to the
well in the adjoining yard, a fenced enclosure which contained a
conglomerate mass of old junk, broken-down wagons, buggies, agricultural
implements, and other odds and ends which the merchant had bought very
low or taken in some sort of exchange for new wares whereby they had
cost him practically nothing. Returning with the water, he had just
seated himself at his desk in the rear when his clerk, James Cahews,
entered at the front, busied himself putting out some samples of
hardware on the porch, and then came back to his employer. He was tall,
well built, had very blue eyes, yellow hair, and a sweeping mustache
which was well curled at the ends. He was without a coat and wore a blue
cravat and a shirt of fancy cotton which matched none too well.

"You beat me to the tank again, Alf," was his jovial greeting. "I would
have got here sooner, but I stopped to drive Mrs. Hayward's cow in for
her. The blamed huzzy took a notion to prance about over the
school-house lot, and the old lady is too near-sighted to see which way
to turn and was afraid she'd get hooked."

"No hurry, no hurry," Henley said, as the other took up a battered tin
sprinkling-pot and, filling it from the pail, began to dampen and sweep
the floor, after which he lazily wiped the counters with a soiled towel.

"Pomp will be here after a while," the clerk said, pausing near where
Henley sat, his glance thoughtfully on the sunlit ground in the yard. "I
come by his cabin. He said he had to run for some medicine for his wife,
and I told him I'd sweep out for him. Them dern niggers had rather take
medicine than eat ice-cream at a festival. I don't know that it's
anybody else's business," he went on, after he had stood the broom in a
corner and was wiping the top of Henley's desk, "but thar is
considerable talk going around that you intend to take a trip to Texas."

"I'm thinking seriously of it," Henley admitted. "I've heard of a deal
or two in land out there that I want to get a finger in. You know, Jim,
that I don't really make my best trades here in this shack; nothing
worth while seems to come this way. I reckon it's because this cou