FullReads

“Of course I wanted to get a stand in–I confess it–and, furthermore, I had not forgotten my early training, and you know that boys on the road are not such a bad tribe as we are ofttimes made out to be. So I promised Brother Ward that I would go up the next morning.

“That part of it was all very good but how do you suppose I felt when, after the lessons had been read, I was called upon to address the Sabbath school? I was up against it, but being in I had to make good; and it often happens that, when a fellow is in the midst of people who assume that he is wise, wisdom comes to him.

“The night before I had come in on a freight. I was mighty tired, fell asleep, and was carried past the station about a mile and a half. All at once I woke up in the caboose–I had been stretched out on the cushions–and asked the conductor how far it was to Kearney. ‘Kearney?’ said the conductor. ‘Kearney? We are a mile and a half past.’ At the same time he sent out a brakeman who signaled down the train. I was fully two miles from the depot when I got off, lugging a heavy grip. I didn’t know it was so far. I had just one thing to do, that was to hoof it down the track. Scared? Bet your life! I thought every telegraph pole was a hobo laying for me, clean down to the station. Luckily there was an electric light tower in the center of the town and this was a sort of guide-post for me and it helped to keep up my courage.

“In the little talk that I had to make to the Sunday School, having this experience of the night before so strong in my mind, I told them of the wandering life I had to live, of how on every hand, as thick as telegraph poles along the railway, stood dangers and temptations; but that I now looked back and that my light tower had always been the little Sunday School of my boyhood days. “When you get right down to it, we all have a little streak of sentiment in us, say what you will, when in boyhood we have had the old-time religion instilled into us. It sticks in spite of everything. It doesn’t at any time altogether evaporate.

“Well, sir, I thought that I was all solid with Brother Ward. So the next morning I figured out that, as I could not go west, where I wished to, I could run up on a branch road and sandwich in another town without losing any time. I went to him early Monday morning and asked if it would be just as convenient for him to see me at three o’clock that afternoon.

“‘Oh, yes, indeed; that will suit me all the better,’ said Brother Ward. ‘That will give me an opportunity to look over my stock of goods and see just what I ought to order.’

“I made the town on the branch road and was back at 2:30. When I went into my sample room, a friend of mine, a competitor, had just packed up. ‘Hello,’ said I, ‘how are things going, Billy?’

“‘Oh, fairly good,’ said he. ‘I have just got a nice bill of straw goods out of Ward, here. Whom do you sell?’

“‘Well, that’s one on me!’ I exclaimed. Then I told my friend of my engagement with Ward, and bought the cigars.

“But anyhow I opened up and went over to see Brother Ward. I got right down to business and said: ‘Brother Ward, my samples are open and I am at your service.’ ‘Well, Brother,’ said he, ‘I have been looking over my stock’ (he had about a dozen and a half of fly-specked straw hats on his show case, left over from the year before and not worth 40 cents), ‘and I have about come to the conclusion that I’ll work off the old goods I have in preference to putting in any new ones. You see if I buy the new ones they will move first and the old goods will keep getting older.’–An old gag, you know!