EVERYTHING is as merry as a marriage bell, and the goose hangs high!” Stephen Whipple quoted, with a hearty laugh, as he and Fred Walton sat on the old man’s veranda after breakfast one Sunday morning. “And I’m a-thinking, my boy, that the suspended fowl is none other than our fellow citizen, J. B. Thorp. He is as mad as a wet hen. He had us plumb down, and, like the bully he is, was pounding the blood out of us with no thought of letting up. Then the rest of the hungry pack of wolves piled on top, and began to get in their work. I was so crazy I didn’t know my hat from a hole in the ground. Then your keen young brain turned the trick, and here we are. Dick has got the dandiest retail store that ever saw the light in a Western town, and it is literally packed and jammed with customers.”
“I am certainly glad it turned out as it did,” Fred replied. “It has been a great thing for Dick.”
The merchant was silent for a moment, and Fred saw him twirling his heavy thumbs as he often did when embarrassed. Finally, after clearing his throat and rather awkwardly crossing his legs, he said:
“I’ve got a silly sort of confession to make, Fred. I reckon nobody is, on the outside, exactly what they are within, and I’ve got my faults like other fellows. On the outside I’m as strait-laced as a hard-shell Baptist, but I’ve always hankered after a periodical lark of some sort. Once in a great while I’ve taken trips just for the pure fun’ of the thing. During the Centennial at Philadelphia I laid down everything and went. I stayed a week, put up at a fine hotel, and lived as high as I knew how. I saw all that there was to see. Then I struck work at one time and went to the Mardi-gras at New Orleans, and then another time I hiked off to the Cotton Exposition in Atlanta. I don’t know why I’m that way, but I am. It is my periodical spree, I reckon. You remember I told you about my boy—the little fellow that passed away?”
“Yes, I remember,” Walton returned, sympathetically.
“Well, as he was growing up, I used to love, above all things, for just me and him—just me and him, you know—to go to places together. Sometimes it was a ride in the country, or fishing, or to do something a little boy would like, but I always sort o’ kept the thought before me that when he’d reached man’s estate, me and him would do some sure-enough ‘bumming,’ as I used to call it—bumming to New York City, where we could take in all the sights like two boys. It may sound silly, but that was one thing I always had to look forward to; but then he took sick and died, and it was out of the question. Since then I’ve never counted on the New York trip.”
“It was sad,” Walton said, gently. “It is a pity he couldn’t have been spared to you.”
“Yes, but he wasn’t,” the merchant sighed. “He wasn’t, and this is what I started out to say: Of all folks I have ever known since my boy’s death, you come nearer filling his place than any one else. No”—and Whipple held up his broad hand—“don’t stop me! I don’t know how it was, but in our first talk that night you kind o’ got hold of my heart-strings. I pitied you as I had never pitied a young fellow before because of the fight you were making. I got interested in it, and determined to help you win. I prayed for you. You were on my mind the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning. You’d said you wanted the money just to pay off the debt you owed your father, and I would have planked the cash right down many and many a time if I hadn’t been af............