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Rh beard growing up to his eyes, tied the reins to the seat and jumped out. After an admonitory curse at the tired horses, he flung open the door and stamped into the store.

He peered down the narrow room.

"Hello, Newt!" he shouted, leaning over the counter, and giving a fat, gray cat a poke with the butt of his whip, "Going to the dance this evening?"

This remark was not addressed to the cat, as might be supposed, but to a young man who sat at a desk with a tall wooden railing, reading a book by the light of a dimly burning lamp. "Well, I don't know, Al," this young man answered, untangling his legs from the rungs of the high stool. "Mabel has kinder set her heart on going, so I suppose I'll turn up. Are the Dixon boys coming?"

"Harry calls off the figures, so he told me," said the first speaker, "and Dirk's goin' to play the fiddle. Let's have some pipe-fodder. I'm run out."

The clerk walked down behind the counter, but, before he reached up on the shelf, the two young men shook hands, without making any further remarks at all.