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 "It'd 'a' took me five years to work and save that much."

"Work and save?" Tom repeated, feigning astonishment. "Don't you call this life work?"

"No, I don't call ridin' around in a wagon on a soft spring seat, behind a double span of good colts work. It's recreation, as the widder woman said when she changed from worshin' to cookin'. I can see now why I never started to git rich before. I always worked so hard at work I never had no time to make money."

"Since you've got the secret, keep it up, old feller."

"I aim to," Waco said, serenely confident.

"You'll make it go," Tom said heartily. "You've made this go—we never would have got anywhere if you hadn't taken hold with both hands while I was down and out. Lucky for the company I was down and out—I never would 'a' plunged into it the way you did and made it pay from the jump."

"Oh, you go on now!" said Waco, modestly embarrassed by the praise. "What I done wasn't out of enterprise, as the feller said. It was done out of revenge on that dang lumber yard man, more than anything else. When I heard he wasn't goin' to die I laid myself out to bust up his bone business. That's why I went into it tooth and toenail."

"Oh, very well," said Tom, with his old-time, wordtossing nonchalance, so expressive of disdain for the lame deceit that Waco laughed.

"Well, it was the makin' of me," Waco said. "I never would 'a' known I had sense enough in me to start up business if I hadn't been crowded to it that way."