T HE next morning when Henley arrived at the store, Cahews, who with a face drawn long was standing at the front, pointed mutely at the lion's cage. Henley looked and groaned. It bore a pasteboard placard, and the words, in big, irregular capitals:

FOR SALE. APPLY TO DIXIE HART.

"She come in here yesterday evening after you'd gone," Cahews explained, "and borrowed my marking-pot and brush. Then she had me get her the pasteboard, and after she had painted the sign she took the nail-box and hammer and went over there and tacked it up. A crowd of school-boys was watching, and raised a laugh, but she come away without paying any attention to them. I tried to get her to reason a little, and told her the money was there in the drawer waiting for her to change her mind, but she said she knowed exactly what she was about, and if I'd lie low I might learn a trick or two in business methods."

"She's off—she's away off!" Henley sighed. "And I'm plumb sorry, for she is, in many other ways, as quick as a steel trap and bright as a new dollar."

One morning, two days later, as the storekeeper was at his desk in the rear writing letters, his attention was called by a keen whistle from Cahews, who stood in the front-door wildly signalling him to approach. And going to the clerk, who was now on the front porch staring toward the lion's cage, he saw that Seth Woods, the begrimed shoemaker, had torn down the placard and stood looking into the cage.

"He's mad about it, I'll bet," was Henley's troubled comment. "I reckon folks have been guying him. That railroad man said he consented to let me use the lot. Maybe he lied to close the trade."

"Maybe he did," agreed Cahews; "but look! What do you make of that?"

A negro man with the shoemakers bench on his shoulder had turned the corner and was headed for the cage. "Put it inside an' go back for the rest," they heard Woods order.

Wonderingly, Henley strode across the street and reached the cage just after the negro had put down the bench on the inside and was coming out of the narrow doorway.

"What's the meaning of this?" Henley inquired of the shoemaker.

"Why," and a complacent smile broke through the grime on Woods's face, "it means, Alf, that I'm at last my own landlord. I've been paying old Welborne fifty dollars a year rent fer that little hole in a wall, away back from the square, because I couldn't get enough ahead to build on this lot or get any other shop. I think I've had a stroke of luck, and, strange to say, it come through a woman. Yesterday evening Dixie Hart come in my shop and axed me if I could straighten the heels of her shoes while she set thar. I told her certainly, an' while I was at work we got to talking first on one topic and then on another. She likes my wife an' daughter, an' she said a good deal about 'em. She axed me if I had any objections to lettin' this cage, which she said she had raked in from you at a big bargain, to set on my lot till somebody come along and bought it. I thought buyin' sech a thing was a powerful quar thing for a young woman to do, but of course I didn't say so to her, for it wa'n't any o' my business. Well, one thing fetched on another till she got to lookin' about my shop while I was trimmin' the heel-taps, an' all at once she wanted to know—if thar was no harm in axin'—what rent I was payin'. I told 'er fifty dollars, an' she whistled kind o' keenlike an' said: 'My gracious! an' got a vacant lot, too, right in the heart o' the square.' I explained to her that I wasn't able to build a shop, an' was afraid I never would be, gettin' old like I am an' so many to feed. Then, Alf, what you think that gal said? As cool as a cucumber in a spring branch, as she set thar wigglin' her toes in 'er stockin' feet, she said: 'You'd better listen to me, an' I'll fix you so you won't have any rent to pay. That lion's cage, just at it stands, with the door openin' on the sidewalk, would make the dandiest shoe-shop in seven States. It's plenty wide and long; it is well-roofed with painted sheet-iron, an' would be as tight in cold weather as a jar of preserves. It faces every street that leads into the square, and you'd get twice as much custom there as you do away back here next to this little pig-trail alley.' By gum, what she said struck me like a bolt of lightnin'. I'd examined the cage, as everybody else in town has, I reckon, an' I knowed all about it, so I up an' axed 'er what she'd paid you for it, an' she kind o' dodged my question.

"'Has that got anything to do with it?' she axed, an' I told 'er, I did, that I heard you was offerin' it fer twenty-five dollars. That seemed to set 'er studyin' fer a minute, an' then she said:

"'To tell you the truth, Mr. Woods, that is all I had to pay, but I got it, you mought say, at that figure by the very skin o' my teeth. In a thoughtless moment Alf Henley said he'd take twenty-five, and, knowing what it was railly worth, I yanked out the money on the spot and laid it down. He's a gentleman'—she said—'Alf Henley is a plumb gentleman, but he tried his level best to back down. Jim Cahews will testify that I was actually obliged to leave the money on the counter and walk out before he'd give in.' Is that so, Alf?"

"I am obliged to say it is, Seth," Henley answered, flushing. "Some'n like that actually did take place."

"I didn't think she'd fib about it," Woods went on, "and I finally axed her what she'd take, an' she said nothin' less than fifty dollars cash down would interest her, as she had a winter cloak to lay in, an' shoes for three women, an' what not.

"I told her fifty looked purty steep, but she throwed herself back an' laughed hearty. She said my rent in the shop fer one year alone would pay it, and after that I'd be a free man. She said in the summer I could prop up both these flap sides, to cut off the sun, an' the wind would blow clean through. She said the very oddity of the thing would draw trade, that I could have the picture of the lion painted out an' a big boot an' shoe put in place of it. Oh, I can't begin to tell you all she said. She'd 'a' been talkin' till now if I hadn't traded: Besides, betwixt me'n you, she give me a scare; you see I was afraid the thing would slip through my fingers, fer she set in to talkin' about havin' it moved to t'other side o' the square and rentin' it fer a barber-shop, an' she 'lowed, too, that it would be a bang-up thing to sell to a convict-camp to keep chain-gang prisoners in.

"As a last resort, I axed her, I did, if she thought I ought to pay her a clean hundred per cent. profit, an' she said: 'That ain't for you to consider at all, Mr. Woods. You must jest let your mind rest on what you are goin' to get out of it. Alf Henley's made money out of it; I must make my part, and you can do the same. It is the way business is run all over the world. As soon as it becomes yours, somebody may come along and pay you a hundred for it, though you'd be a fool to let it go even at that. You are the one man in all the world that ought to hold on to it.' She was right, Alf. I'm tickled over the change. I feel like a new man. You ought to have seen old Welborne's face when I told 'im I was goin' to vacate. He swore Dixie Hart was a meddlesome hussy, an' that she had cheated the hindsight off of me. He said she owed him an' was behind in her pay, an' that he was goin' to fetch 'er to taw."

Henley went back to his desk. There was a flush on his brow.

"Beat to a finish, and by a girl," he mused. "Here I've been thinking I had nothing to learn about trading, and she picks up one of my remnants and turns it over at a hundred per cent. profit as easy as knitting a pair of socks. If I'd lived a hundred years I'd never have thought about that shoe-shop."