white. Now, gentlemen, the opportunity of your lives is kicking you in the pants. Are you men of vision? Think what Ford, Edison, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Julius Caesar would do. Obey that impulse. You can’t lose. The town is coming this way. Listen carefully. Do you hear it? Swell. The new courthouse will be built on yonder hill, the undertaker and the village bakery will occupy handsome edifices of pressed brick just above you. Oyez, oyez, oyez. What am I offered? What am I offered? Own your own home in beautiful Homewood, within a cannonshot of all railway, automobile, and airplane connections. Running water abounds within a Washingtonian stone’s throw and in all the pipes. Our caravans meet all trains. Gentlemen, here’s your chance to make a fortune. The ground is rich in mineral resources—gold, silver, copper, iron, bituminous coal and oil, will be found in large quantities below the roots of all the trees.”
“What about the bushes, Luke?” yelled Mr. Halloran, the dairy-lunch magnate.
“Down in the bushes, that is where she gushes,” Luke answered amid general tumult. “All right, Major. You with the face. What am I offered? What am I offered?”
When there was no sale, he greeted incoming tourists at the station-curbing with eloquent invitations to Dixieland, rich, persuasive, dominant above all the soliciting babel of the car— drivers, negro hotel-porters, and boarding-house husbands.
“I’ll give you a dollar apiece for every one you drum up,” said Eliza.
“O that’s all right.” O modestly. Generously.
“He’d give you the shirt off his back,” said Gant.
A fine boy. As she cooled from her labors in the summer night, he brought her little boxes of ice-cream from town.
He was a hustler: he sold patent washboards, trick potato-peelers, and powdered cockroach-poison from house to house. To the negroes he sold hair-oil guaranteed to straighten kinky hair, and religious lithographs, peopled with flying angels, white and black, and volant cherubs, black and white, sailing about the knees of an impartial and crucified Saviour, and subtitled “God Loves Them Both.”
