paid ten dollars and a half for—"

"Ten year and a half ago," I put in, involuntary, as you might say.

"It’s a lie. ’Twon’t be nine year till next September. You think you’re funny, don’t you? Ever since this consarned, robbin’ Black Republican administration made you postmaster! Postmaster! You’re a healthy postmaster! I’ll have you arrested! I’ll march straight out and have you took up. I will!"

He headed for the door. I didn’t say nothin’. I was sorry about the clothes and I’d have paid for 'em willin’ly, but arguin’ just then was a waste of time, as the feller said when the deef and dumb man caught him stealin’ apples. Ebenezer stamped as fur as the door and then turned around.

"I may not have you took up," he says; "but I’ll get even with you, Zeb Snow, yet. You wait."

After he’d gone and we’d made the place look a little less like an egg-nog, I took Jim Henry by the sleeve and led him into the back room where we could be alone. Even there the surroundin’s was so cluttered up with goods and bales and boxes that we had to stand edgeways and talk out of the sides of our mouths.

"Jim," says I, "this place of ours ain’t big enough. We’ve got to have more room."

He pretended to be dreadful surprised.

"Why, why, Skipper!" he says. "You shock me. This is so sudden. What put such an idea as that in your head? Seems to me I have a vague remembrance of handin’ you that suggestion no less than twenty-five times since the last change of the moon, but I hope that didn’t influence you."

"Aw, dry up," says I. "You was right. Let it go at that. Afore I got the postmastership this buildin’ was big enough. Now it ain’t. We’ve got to build on or move or somethin’. Have you got any definite plan?"

He smiled, superior and top-lofty, and reached over to pat me on the back; but reachin’ in that crowded junk-shop was bad judgment, ’cause his elbow hit against the corner of a tea chest and his next set of remarks was as explosive and fiery as a box of ship rockets.

"Never mind the blessin’," I says. "Go ahead with the fust course. Have you got anything up your sleeve? anything besides that bump, I mean."

Well, it seems he had. Seems he’d thought it all out. We’d ought to buy Philander Foster’s buildin’, 

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