"Everybody says the same," said Wilkins with a touch of pride. "The Sir Walter Scott man said it, and I guess it's so. But there's other things besides books. Kilo may be strong and willin' on books, but she's strong other ways, too, and just now she is lookin' at another kind of horse, and that's why I say you've miscalculated your comin'. If I was you I'd go elsewhere and come back later. Kilo has got more books now than she can handle without straining something, and just now her mind's off on another tack. We struck a big missionary revival here last week, and you can bet a wager that every dollar that goes out of Kilo these days, except what goes for dues on Sir Walter, is goin' for the brethren. The women folks is havin' a sale this very evenin' to raise cash to help the heathen."

Eliph' Hewlitt arose from his chair and tucked the oilcloth-covered parcel that had been lying on his knees under his left arm. He was a small man, and his movements were apt to be short and jerky.

"Missionary sale?" he said briskly. "I guess I'll go around and look in on it. Strangers welcome, I suppose? I'm rather fond of missionary sales, and I think the world and all of the heathen. Think the ladies would like to see a stranger?"

Wilkins grinned.

"Pap," he said, "what you think? Think they'll fall on his neck if he has any money? From what I have experienced of them sales I figger to calculate that anybody that is anxious to buy gingham ap.r.o.ns an' sofa pillows is sure to be took by the hand and given a front seat. I'd go around with you, but I've got my taxes to pay, like Pap here, and I don't actually need any pink tidies. It ain't far; just up to Doc Weaver's; two blocks up, and you can't miss the house. It's the yeller mansion, this side the road, an' the gate's off the hinges and laid up alongside the fence. But I guess if them's your samples in that there package, you might as well leave them here."

But Eliph' Hewlitt did not leave them there; he tucked them under his arm, and hurried away with brisk little steps.

CHAPTER V. Sammy Mills

"There ought to be a license agin book agents," said Pap Briggs spitefully, when Eliph' Hewlitt had hurried away.

"It wouldn't harm that feller," said Wilkins. "He's a red hot one at book-agenting, he is, an' he'd find out some way to git round it. I hear lot of book agents that come round this way tell of him. He's got a record of sellin' more copies of that encyclopedia book of his than any one man ever sold of any one book, an' he's a sort of hero of the book-agenting business. It makes me proud to call to remembrance that him an' me was kids together down at Franklin, years ago. Him an' me took to the book-agentin' biz the same day, we did. I needed cash, like I always do, and he had literatoor in the family. So we went an' did it. We did it to Gallops Junction first, and after that Eliph' sowed literatoor pretty general all over Iowa, an' next I heard of him all over the United States. Iowa is now a grand State, an as full of culture as a Swiss cheese is full of holes, an' I don't take all the credit for it; I give Eliph' his share. Hotels help to scatter the seed, but literatoor scatters more.

"One day, down there at Franklin, Eliph' says to me, 'Jim, you know that book pa wrote?' That's what Eliph' remarked to me on the aforesaid day, but I wish to state his name wasn't Eliph' on that date, an' it wasn't Hewlitt, neither. It was plain Sammy; Sammy Mills. Eliph' Hewlitt was a sort of fancy name my pa had give to a horse he had that he thought was a racer, but wasn't. It was a good enough horse to enter in a race, but not good enough to win. It was the kind of race horse that kept pa poor, but hopeful.

"'Why, yes, Sammy,' I says, 'I've heard tell of that grand literary effort of your dad.'

"'Well,' he says--we was sittin' on the porch of his pa's house--'Pa he had a thousand of them printed.'

"'d.i.c.kens he did!' I remarked, supposin' it was us to me to do some remarkin'.

"'And,' says Sammy, 'he's got eight hundred an' sixty-four of them highly improvin' an' intellectooal volumes stored in the barn right now.'

"'Quite a lib'ry,' I says, off-hand like.

"'Numerous, but monotonous,' says Sam. 'As a lib'ry them books don't give the variety of topics they oughter. They all cling to the same subject too faithful. Eight hundred an' sixty-four volumes of the "Wage of Sin," all bound alike, don't make what I call a rightly differentiated lib'ry. When you've read one you've read all.'

"'Alas!' I says, or somthin' like that, sympathetic an' attentive.

"'Likewise,' says Sam, 'they clutter up the barn. They ought to be got out to make room for more hay.'

"'This was indeed true. I saw it was all good sense. Horses don't take to literatoor like they does to hay.

"'Well,' says Sammy, 'what's the matter with chuckin' them eight hundred an' sixty-four "Wages of Sin" into the rustic communities of this commonwealth of Iowa, U.S.A.? Here we've got a barnful of high-cla.s.s, intellectooal poem, an' yon we have a State full of yearnin' minds, clamorous for mental improvement at one fifty per volume. It's our duty to chuck them poems into them minds, an' to intellectooally subside them clamors.'

"I shook my head quite strenuous.

"'Nix for me!' I remarked; 'no book-agenting for me.'

"'Who said book-agenting?" asked Sammy, deeply offended. 'Do you calculate that the son of a high-cla.s.s author of a famous an' helpful book would turn book agent? Never!'

"'What then?' I asks him.

"'Just a little salubrious an' entertainin' canva.s.sin' for a work of genius,' he says. 'A few heart-to-heart talks with the educated ladies of Gallops Junction an' Tomville on the beauties of the "Wage of Sin."

That ain't no book-agenting,' says he, 'that's pickin' money off the trees. It's pie ready cut an' handed to us on a plate with a gilt edge.

All we've got to do is to bite it.'

"No, let me tell you right here, Pap, that the 'Wage of Sin' was a thoroughbred treat to read. It was a moral book. Next to the Bible it was the morallest book I ever tackled, an' when W. P. Mills wrote that book he gave the literatoor of the U.S.A. a boost in the right direction that it hasn't recovered from yet. It was the champion long distance poem of the nineteenth century. That book showed what a chunky an'

nervous mind old W. P Mills had. There was ten thousand verses to that book of poem, part.i.tioned off into various an' sundry parts so the read thereof could sit up an' draw breath about every thousand verses, an'

get his full wind ready for the run through the next slice.

"That 'Wage of Sin' book was surely for to admire, any way you looked at it. Take the subject; it wasn't any of your little, sawed-off, one-year sprints. No siree! W. P. Mills started away back in the front vestibule of time. He said, right in the preface--an' that was all poetry, too--

Now, reader, go along with me Away back to eternity, A hundred thousand years, and still Keep backing backwards if you will.

"An' when he got away back there he sort of expectorated on his hands an' started in at Genesis, Chapter One, Verse One, an' went right along down through the Bible like a cross-cut saw through a cottonwood log. He never missed a single event that was important, if true. He got all them old fellers rhymed right into that book--Jereboam, Rehoboam, Meschach, Schadrach, an' Abednego, an' all the whole caboodle, from Adam with an A to Zaccheus with a Z.

"That certain was a moral tome, an' no prevarication. It was plumb drippin' with moral from start to finish. You see Eve she set the ball a-rollin' when she swiped them apples. That was where she done dead wrong, and that was the 'Sin' as mentioned in the name of the book, an'

old W. P. Mills he showed in that literary volume how everybody has had to pay the 'Wages' ever since. It was great. I never read anything else moral that I could say I really hankered for, but I sure did enjoy that book. Old W. P. Mills was a wonder at poetry.

"It beat all how vivid he made all them Old Testament people, an' the things they did. Why, I never cared two cents for Shadrach, Meshach, an'

Abednego before I read that book, but after I read it I never could git them lines of W. P.'s out of my head--

'The King perhaps that moment saw A thing that filled his soul with awe-Shadrach and Meshach, to and fro, Walked and talked with Abednego.'

"I tell you, you can't obliterate them three men out of your mind when you read that verse once. You see them walkin' in that fiery furnace, even when you're in your little bed; walkin' an' carryin' on a conversation, which, when you come to think of it, was the most natural thing for them to be doin'. You wouldn't look to see them sit down on a hot log, or to stand still sayin' nothin'. Walk an' talk, that's what they did, an' it's what anybody would do in similar circ.u.mstances. I guess fiery furnaces has that effect all the world over, but it took W.

P. Mills to see it with his mind's eye, an' put it into verses.

"So, when Sammy gently intimated to me that it was his pa's book we was to canva.s.s, the job looked different. I might shy at an encyclopedia, or at a life of Stephen A. Douglas, but to handle a moral volume like the 'Wage of Sin' sort of appealed to the financial morality of my conscience. So I asked Sammy what the gentlemanly canva.s.sers would get out of it.

"'Pa had a lot of faith in that lyric poem,' says Sammy to me, 'an' no one had a better right to, for he wrote it himself, but the publishing game was dull an' depressed about the time he got ready to issue it forth, an' he was necessitated to compensate the cost of printing it himself. And,' he says, 'the rush an' hurry of the public to buy that book is such it reminds me of the eagerness of a kid to get spanked. So I figger we can get several wagon-loads of "Wage of Sin" at fifty cents per volume.'

"'That's a cheap price,' I says, 'That's two hundred verses for one cent, an' the cover free.'

"Sammy was one of the confidential kind that gets close up to your ear and whispers, even if he is only tellin' you that it looks like rain, so he looks all around and whispers to me:

"'We'll make our initiative beginnin' first off at Gallops Junction,'

he says, 'where we ain't known, an' where pa ain't known, an' where the book ain't known. I've a premonition,' he says, 'that 'twould be better so. If we was to start in here we would get discouraged, for the folks ain't used to buyin' "Wage of Sin." They've been given it so bountiful an' free that pa can't give away another copy to the poorest man in town. They've got so that they run when they see pa comin'.'

"'You've got sense in that red head of your'n,' I says.

"'For me,' he says, 'it will be merely a voluptuous excursion. It will be pie to sell that book, because I am the son of its author. Filial relationship to genius,' he says, 'will make them overawed, an' grateful to be allowed to buy of me, but you will have it harder. You can't claim nearer kin to genius than that you helped the son of it chop wood at various and sundry times.'

"'And gave him a handsome black eye one time,' I says reminiscently.

'I'll make the most of that. The public likes anecdotes.'

"'No,' says Sammy, 'you can omit to mention that black-eye business.

That kind of an anecdote would be harrowing to the minds of literary inclined gentlefolks. You can reminisce about how you helped me carry wood while I recited pa.s.sages of poem out of that book at you.'

"What I would have spoke next don't matter, because I omitted to speak it. I was gettin' a glimmer of an idea into my head, and I wanted to get it clear in and settled down to stay before I lost it. It got in, an'

I had a realization that it was an O.K. idea, an' that it beat Sammy's son-of-his-father idea quite scandalous.