Short Stories / Рассказы

She looked him in the eye, and said: “You are a very wicked man. Father and I will go back home. You say it was a joke? I think it is a very serious matter.”

But at the end of half an hour’s argument the conversation had been turned upon a different subject. The two were considering the respective merits of pale blue and pink wall-paper with which the old colonial mansion of the Atwoods in Dalesburg was to be decorated after the wedding.

On the next morning Johnny confessed to Mr Hemstetter. The shoe merchant put on his spectacles, and said through them: “You strike me as being a most extraordinary young scamp.

If I had not managed this enterprise with good business judgment my entire stock of goods might have been a complete loss. Now, how do you propose to dispose of the rest of it?”

When the second invoice of cockleburrs arrived Johnny loaded them and the remainder of the shoes into schooner, and sailed down the coast to Alazan. There, in the same dark and diabolical manner, he repeated his success: and came back with a bag of money and not so much as a shoestring.

And then he besought his great Uncle of the waving goatee and starred vest to accept his resignation,[10 - Дядя Сэм – символ Соединенных Штатов. Его принято изображать в виде сухопарого верзилы с длинной бородкой, в жилете, усеянном звездами (национальный флаг).

] for the lotus no longer lured him. He hankered for the spinach and cress of Dalesburg.

The services of Mr William Terence Keogh as acting consul, pro term., were suggested and accepted, and Johnny sailed with the Hemstetters back to his native shores.

Keogh slipped into the sinecure of the American consulship with the ease that never left him even in such high places. The tintype establishment was soon to become a thing of the past, although its deadly work along the peaceful and helpless Spanish Main was never effaced.

The restless partners were about to be off again, scouting ahead of the slow ranks of Fortune. But now they would take different ways. There were rumors of a promising uprising in Peru; and thither the martial Clancy would turn his adventurous steps. As for Keogh, he was figuring in his mind and on quires of Government letter-heads a scheme that dwarfed the art of misrepresenting the human countenance upon tin.