Argosy All-Story Weekly — page 102: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

892° tobacco for the men. I’m telling you, Sal- viny, in another year I’ll’‘be sitting pretty. Have a touring car, like as not, besides the delivery car.” Salviny was impressed, though she did not want it to appear too plainly. ‘ Sounds all right, Tom,” she said, “ but you don’t Want to go peddling all your life do you?” ‘Huh, ’course not. Don’t you see what I’m figuring on? Sooner or later I’ll have a store of my own—a big one here in Wind- ham, maybe; sort of a distributing center with peddling routes all over this part of the State. It’s a big thing, Salviny.” She did not say anything and there en- sued a slight hiatus. The young man, watching narrowly out of the corner of his eye, saw that she was looking into nothing- ness with a dreamy stare. The motion of her legs and jaws became less vigorous, more meditative, so to speak. Indeed, Sal- viny was engaged in a common reverie of her sex. She was picturing herself as the wife of the young man at her side, with the prestige and wealth of that possible store behind her and that possible touring car— nay, a snappy roadster of her own—at her command. Presently Mr. Gilmore coughed slightly by way of preface to a change of subject. Too long a silence irked him. “T haven’t had a chance yet to say hello to Abner, Salviny,” he said, and butter would not have melted in his mouth. ‘“ How’s he getting along? I guess he’s learning the business fast, ain’t he?” Salviny came back to the present. ‘“‘Him? Oh, he’s getting along all right, I guess.” Her pride succumbed to her dis- appointment. ‘Don’t suppose Abner’s quite so good a hand at business as you are, Tom.” She laughed nervously and the motion of her legs became erratically ener- getic again. ‘““ No? Oh, well, we can’t all be the same, Salviny. If I do say it myself I saw a good op’tunity and jumped to it. Prob’ly Abner will do well enough when he gets started, though.” “ May—like as not.” Another hiatus which the slow, easy voice of Abner Hitchcock drifted in to fill. Out from the dining room tiptoed one of ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY. the waitresses, Lucy Wilmer, and stood at the screen door to listen, a dinner bell in her hand. No male person would have denied that she made a very fetching pic- ture whatever may have been the coldly critical thoughts of Salviny. ‘“ , . -Wouldn’t be surprised if you could get hens to lay more by lighting the coop with electric lights and turning on the lights before sun-up. <A hen’s an ambitious critter and she wants to be up and doing as soon as it’s light, though prob’ly it would be a good idee to have an alarm clock in the coop, too, in case some of the hens didn’t wake up prompt when the lights was turned on, on account of being short of sleep. “But when it comes to getting a flock of hens to lay more eggs I reckon nobody’ll ever get any scheme that’ll work any bet- ter than one of Elmer Toole’s did—for a while, leastways. You see, Elmer got at the fund’mentals of the problem, as he said, the same being the hen’s mind, though there’s many a time when it don’t seem that a hen has anything that can rightly be called a mind, like when she crosses the road. But anyway, Elmer studied the hen for a long time and finally he figured out that the reason a hen cackles every time she lays an egg is because she is one of the vainest critters there is, and gets all swelled up with pride over every ege. So Elmer he figured that the way to stimulate the hen to greater effort was to play on her jealousy, pride and jealousy going hand in hand, and the hen being a female anyway. “So he built an artificial hen, covered with real chicken’s skin and feathers, and having a powerful loud cackle, and he filled the bird with eggs and turned on the elec- tricity and set her going, and she’d hop on the nest, lay an egg, then hop off and cackle about it tremenjous for fifteen min- utes, and then hop on again, lay another egg, jump off and raise that loud insulting cackle for another quarter of an hour. And so on all day, the other hens getting crazier and crazier. with jealousy all the time and just busting theirselves to keep up with that contraption. It was a sight to see them hens crowd up to that nest every time that bird hopped off after laying an egg and peer into it and take a look at the big nest- oO Comicbooks CO