A Son of the City Part 27

A woman, her arms full of grocery packages, stopped him and fumbled in her purse. Across the street, a whistle sounded. He dropped the nickel into his pocket, gave over the last of the troublesome sheets, and started for home. Again came the whistle. He made a trumpet of his hands and bellowed "Sold out" as he turned the corner. If he had only more copies! At least sixty could have been sold.

Nevertheless, fifty cents for the pig bank--a dime was to be reserved for the morrow's capital--wasn't bad. Surely the other dollar and a half could be saved by the end of the week. Earning a thousand dollars was as easy as rolling off a log.

John kissed his mother good-bye in high good humor, as he left for school in the morning. She watched him for a moment as he danced along the gusty, wind-swept street, and went in to sit by the parlor grate for a few moments. Hardly had she opened her magazine when the front door-bell rang, and the neighbor from across the way stood on the threshold, panting and very much excited.

"My dear Mrs. Fletcher," she shrilled in her acrid tones. "Do tell me all about it!"

Her hostess led her into the parlor and drew up a companion chair before the fire. "About what?" she asked.

"About Mr. Fletcher." The neighbor warmed her hands a moment before the dancing flames, while Mrs. Fletcher looked a mute inquiry.

"Mrs. Shultz, she's my washerwoman," went on the thin, nasal voice, "said this morning that John had told her little boy he had to sell papers because your husband had had trouble with his employer and had lost his position." She would have added further details as to the straits the Fletchers were supposed to be in, if something in that lady's manner had not prevented her.

"So I said to Mrs. Leland, next door," concluded the neighbor from across the way, "that I hoped things were not as bad as they seemed, and that I'd run right over to ask you."

"John told _what_?" asked that youngster's mother, now that the verbal torrent had halted.

The story was repeated. Mrs. Fletcher broke into relieved laughter.

"I'll have to interview that son of mine when he gets home," she said as she leaned forward to explain matters.

But when John did appear, his mother was far more lenient with him than he had any right to expect. She was still too amused at the turn of affairs to be anything else.

Two weeks sped past. In spite of the success of that first paper venture, the lesson was not lost upon John, who recruited a dozen or so regular customers from among his mother's friends the next afternoon.

Since then, thanks to persistent effort, the list had steadily grown until he was able to double his first day's order without danger of financial loss. The errands for the neighbors had not materialized to swell his income, nor had other umbrella days followed the first one.

But indeed, the paper route occupied too much of his time to permit such side issues.

His minimum income was now at the respectable mark of a dollar and seventeen cents a week and still growing. At first, the thought that he was falling below the two dollar limit troubled him sorely until he remembered that everything must have a beginning. Just wait until a year from now; he'd make five dollars a week, he would!

"I'll bet you five thousand dollars that I do," he had told Silvey when that youngster scoffed at his plans as they walked to school, one bleak, overcast noon. Needless to say, Bill did not meet the wager. He wasn't accustomed to thinking in such large sums and, besides, John's manner was singularly convincing.

Louise, the business man scarcely saw at all, save to walk home with her from school now and then, or to take her on Sunday expeditions to the park. On one of the strolls, she told of further experiments in the science of cookery. "And mother says you can come up and watch, tomorrow."

He declined as diplomatically as possible. Nondelivery of the papers spelled failure for the new business. Would she mind?

Louise shook her head. Nevertheless, John felt that she was hurt. Hang it all, couldn't a girl understand? How was the thousand dollars which was to start them housekeeping to be earned if he loafed away his afternoons?

Mrs. Fletcher took him down town the Sat.u.r.day before Thanksgiving.

Already the holiday throngs were beginning to fill the noisy, grimy streets and pa.s.sage, in them was both tedious and difficult for a small boy. Weary after the morning of tramping from store to store, they were returning to the railroad station when a display in a furniture store window caught his eye.

Rich plush hangings and an occasional picture gave the impression of the walls of a room. In the center, a s.h.i.+ny mahogany bed stood, with a dresser of like material and fragile, spindle-legged chairs grouped around it.

He tugged at his mother's hand to stop a moment. She obeyed indulgently, as his eyes became glued to the little sign in the foreground.

"Bedroom set. Adam style. Reduced to _three hundred and sixty-five dollars_."

He gasped. Three hundred and sixty-five dollars for a bed and a dresser and chairs which would break the first time a small boy plumped down on them! Then came the appalling thought: _"How far would a thousand dollars last with such prices?"_

All the speeding ride homeward, and after supper as he stretched out on the bed before undressing, he worried over this new and unexpected problem. If bedroom furniture _alone_ cost that much and the pictures and carpet were still to be paid for, the total would at least be four hundred and fifty dollars. The parlor should cost even more, for chairs, a sofa, and a reading table were to be placed in it. As for the dining-room, he shrank from a consideration of that expense! And there were dishes and books and silverware! Two thousand dollars was the least he could expect his five furnished rooms to cost, and he had considered half that amount sufficient for all expenses. Newly married folks usually took honeymoon trips, too. He groaned. Would he ever earn enough to marry Louise?

Thanksgiving drew nearer. At school, on the Wednesday immediately preceding, the chosen few who were Miss Brown's personal aides, stayed after school at noon to decorate the room for the entertainment to be given at a quarter of two. Her desk was backed against the wall, and the cornstalks used by the drawing cla.s.s as models for their efforts, were grouped against it to form a background for the impa.s.sioned actors. A supply of pumpkins, gourds, and other autumnal fruits of the earth, borrowed by the teacher from the grocer with whom her mother traded, gave still greater festivity to the room.

There was no need of roll call. Every child was there, for they were too much interested to absent themselves.

Miss Brown gave a brief history of the origin of the day. A little girl whose pink dress clashed violently with her red hair and freckled complexion, followed with a rendition of a doleful poem beginning:

Only a grain of corn, Moth_ur_, Only a grain of corn.

Then the cla.s.s sang one of the songs in the fourth-grade music book and settled back expectantly, for the feature piece of the afternoon.

Silvey and Red Brown dragged a long, green curtain along a wire which ran from one side of the room to the other, until the platform was hidden from the room's eager gaze. A scurry of gray calico came from the coat closet which served as the green room for the amateur actors. A boy, m.u.f.fled mysteriously in a long cloak, followed. Miss Brown gave a last look to see that the stage was properly arranged, and the curtain was pulled back against the wall again.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _It was Sid and Louise!_]

It was Sid and Louise! He'd thrown aside the long cloak (insisted upon because he'd feel like a fool if the cla.s.s saw him in costume while waiting for the play to begin), and stood forth in high, paper cuffs hiding his coat sleeves well up to his elbows, and a queerly shaped, high-buckled hat which threatened to slide down over his ears at any moment. Louise, in a Priscilla gray gown, waited for the pilgrim father to begin his lines. The cla.s.s applauded wildly, for the spirit of make believe threw them back into those tempestuous early days along the Atlantic Coast.

John heard not a word of the scenes which followed. He was sorely disturbed. There was Sid on the platform with his beloved, waving his arms back and forth in fervid, pump-handle motions which Louise seemed to mind not a bit. Hang it all, that kid must be trying to cut him out!

But he'd show him. Just wait until his thousand dollars was earned.

Then his calculations of that Sat.u.r.day evening came back to throw an icy feeling into the pit of his stomach. What right had he to hope when housefurnis.h.i.+ngs were at such a figure?

Mrs. Fletcher set him to picking the pinfeathers from the turkey when he came in from his paper route that night. He turned to with a gusto, mindful of the culinary treats which were to come, and blissfully conscious of four long holidays, Thursday, Friday, Sat.u.r.day, and Sunday, in which he could sleep as late as he wanted--besides, he could see a little more of Louise. He didn't like the way she had acted on the platform. Perhaps he had been a little neglectful, but just wait a few years. Then he'd--but the thought of that costly furniture put an end to his dreams.

Thanksgiving morning he haunted the kitchen incessantly, dancing now to the little pantry to swing back the doors and feast his eyes on the huge mince pie which waited on the bottom shelf, and then back to the kitchen where he pestered his mother with innumerable questions until she drove him out into the snappy, late November air. He scampered up to Bill's house, where the two boys retired to the chilly seclusion of the shack and compared notes.

"We've got a fifteen-pound turkey," said John boastfully.

"That's nothing," Silvey dug scornfully into the hard dirt floor with his heel. "You ought to see ours. Twenty pounds, and my, such a big fellow! Cranberry sauce an' roast potatoes, an' squash to go with him.

Umm-m-m."

"So've we," retorted John, undaunted by this itemized account. "Your turkey may be bigger'n ours, but it won't taste as good, for my ma (he'd forgotten his a.s.sertion regarding Louise) is the best cook in the whole world and there isn't anyone can beat her."

Certain empty pangs in nature's alarm clock brought him home half an hour early to inquire about dinner. He was most starved to death.

Wouldn't mother hurry it up? Mother couldn't--expert cookery was not to be hurried. He'd better go out again for a while.

Instead, he carried the morning paper into the parlor and lounged in the big easy chair. The minutes slipped past as he devoured news items, the fiction supplement, and miraculous patent medicine announcements with amusing impartiality. He turned to an inner page and found a huge advertis.e.m.e.nt staring him in the face. At the top, floated a streamer with the legend, "You furnish the girl, we furnish the house!" Further down the page were furniture bargains innumerable, for sale on a plan of "One dollar down, seventy-five cents per week," and in the center, between heavy rules, was the announcement, "Four rooms, furnished complete, only ninety-five dollars!"

"John," called his father from the dining-room. "Come to dinner!"

He threw the paper from him in sudden exultation, and danced in to the dining-table. His eye took in each detail of the evenly browned national bird, the long, slender stalks of celery in the dainty china dish, the deep-red cranberry jelly, the appetizing roasted potatoes, and the golden squash, and he smiled happily.

"Jiminy, that looks good, Mother!" He plumped into his seat. "Hurry up, dad, I'm most ready to eat the house!"

But through his brain, as he attacked a third helping of turkey and its accessories, there still ran the exultant echo of "Four rooms, furnished complete, only ninety-five dollars!"

Thus did the day become a real Thanksgiving to him.