Part 21

"Well," I says, "I was just promising to show him how to rope; he says he wants to learn."

"When are you going to show him, Curly?"

"Oh, sometime some morning, like enough, down there on the dock. He says he'll sneak over from his place, so no one will see him. I don't reckon your pa will mind my showing a young fellow how to rope--I'd like to feel a rope in my hand again anyhow. I expect before long he'll be wearing a wide hat and singing 'O, bury me not on the lone prairee!'"

"Curly," says she.

"What?"

"Did you find my rope in along with those in the big room? I forget whether I brought it along."

"Kid," says I, "if there's going to be any instruction to hired men on the rope or mouth organ or jew's-harp, or anything of that sort, it's me that gives it. I'm segundo on this ranch. Now you go on upstairs."

She had her hair all pushed back now under her cap, wet as it was, standing there fixing it. She was in her bathing clothes still and awful wet, but she didn't seem cold. She looked kind of pink and sort of happy; I don't know why. Lord, she was a fine-looking girl! There never was one handsomer than Bonnie Bell Wright.

"Kid, you heard me!" says I. "Go on upstairs now and get your clothes on. And you don't go out in that boat no more!"

VIII

HOW OLD MAN WRIGHT DONE BUSINESS

As the weather begun to get warmer and we got out-of-doors more, it was cheerfuller around our place. Bonnie Bell chirked up quite a bit. She used to sing some. It seemed like she was going to get used to living in town--not me; never!

But Old Man Wright didn't seem to worry none somehow. He was one of the sort that, put him down anywheres and he'd be busy at something. If he was set down on a sand bar beside a creek he'd reach around to find some sticks; and, first thing you know, he'd be building a house out of 'em--he just always was making things somehow. I never seen a man could size up a piece of country for what it would perduce better than him.

"Curly," says he to me one day when I was down in his new office and he was talking about making money, "there's different ways of getting rich," says he, "but only one system. Either get what a mighty few thinks they got to have--that's things for rich folks; or else get something that everybody has got to have whether they want it or not--that's things for poor folks. And when you're in the game you buy when things is low and sell when they is high. Nigh about every man you know plays the game just the other way around. That's why there's so many poor folks," says he. "Yet the game is plumb easy to beat when you know how, if making money is all you care about.

"For instance," says he, "when I bought that bunch of stock in the Lake Electric a while ago it was when nobody wanted it or let on they wanted it. Since then it has riz round fifteen or twenty points and it'll go higher. When I sold the Circle Arrow it was when them folks wanted it right bad. Between you and me, them people paid more for it than it was worth. I may buy it in some day when they don't want it no more."

"You reckon you ever will, Colonel?" says I, plumb happy to think of that.

"If I was alone in the world, with just you, I shorely would right off," says he, "no matter what it cost. With Bonnie Bell in the game, too, I don't know what I'll do nor when I'll do it.

"I don't have such a hard time here," he went on after a while. "For instance, just a few weeks ago I was reading in the papers about this war in Europe--which is a shame and a awful thing; and I hope it won't come here, though if it does you and me are in," says he. "Well, I seen how they make so much powder and sell it--smokeless powder. For that they have to use a awful lot of picric acid."

"What kind of acid?" says I. "Pickles?"

"I don't know," says he. "I wouldn't know it if it was on a plate--only I know they have to make smokeless powder out of it. So I bought all I could find laying round here or there--not very much; only two or three hundred thousand dollars' worth.

"Well," says he, stretching out his legs and yawning, "it's the same old story, Curly. I couldn't help it and I didn't mean to do it the least way in the world; but now this here picric acid--whatever it is--it's worth two or three times what it was just a little while ago. I cleaned up--oh, maybe two or three hundred thousand dollars on that. There ain't enough in these things to keep me very busy. I don't care for making money nohow, because it's so easy. If there was a real man's game now, I wouldn't mind mixing with it."

"Cows is something that folks has to have whether they are rich or poor," says I to him.

"Shore; and it's a good game too. If you look around you'll find that there is some things that everybody has got to use somehow, somewhere--wood, copper, oil, iron; things like that. You can't build houses and live in 'em unless you have some of them things. Everybody has to buy 'em in wholesale or in retail. I like to buy 'em a little farther back even than wholesale--when they are what you call raw resources.

"If you take things that's made up in packages you can sell them too, a little at a time, but slow. Some folks likes to trade that way; they got to have pictures--objects--right before 'em to believe their money's safe. That's a little slow for me and you, Curly. I like to take the goods before they are put up in packages and buy a lot of them--something that folks has got to have."

"That's where your game is weak, Colonel," says I. "For instance, you deal in cows on the hoof. That ain't respectable. When you cut up cows and hogs into sides, hams and sausage, then's when you get respectable. Ain't you got plenty proof of that? Look at them Wisners, for instance."

He snorts at that and ain't happy.

"Well, it's the truth," says I. "Look at us! We ain't nobody here. Old Man Wisner's the king bee of this here row of houses. We ain't one-two-ten in this race."

"Huh! Is that so? I'm running free, under a pull; and you can't kick. But then, we're having all the fun--not Bonnie Bell."