Page:Dorothy Canfield--Hillsboro People.djvu/215

 the absence of the usual excitement over the entertainment, and in the stagnation all attention was directed to the new joke on the wheat king. It was turned over and over, forward and back, and refurbished and made to do duty again and again, after the fashion of rustic jokes. This one had the additional advantage of lining the pockets of the perpetrators. They egged one another on to fresh inventions and variations, until even the children, not to be left out, began to have exploits of their own to tell. The grocers raised the price of kerosene, groaning all the time at the extortions of the oil trust, till the guileless guardian of Mr. Camden's funds was paying fifty cents a gallon for it. The boys charged a quarter for every bouquet of pine-boughs they brought to decorate the cold, empty reading-room. The washer-woman charged five dollars for "doing-up" the lace sash-curtains. As spring came on, and the damages wrought by the winter winds must be repaired, the carpenters asked wages which made the sellers of firewood tear their hair at wasted opportunities. They might have raised the price per cord! The new janitor, hearing the talk about town, demanded a raise in salary and threatened to leave without warning if it were not granted.

It was on the fifth of June, a year to a day after the arrival of Mr. Camden in his automobile, that Miss Martin yielded to this last extortion, and her action made the day as memorable as that of the year before. The janitor, carried away by his victory, celebrated his good fortune in so many glasses of hard cider that he was finally carried home and deposited limply on the veranda of his boarding-house. Here he slept till the cold of dawn awoke him to a knowledge of his whereabouts, so inverted