stock whenever I go through a big town. There's always a second-hand bookstore somewhere about, where you can pick up odds and ends. And every now and then I write to a wholesaler in New York for some stuff. When I buy a book I mark in the back just what I paid for it, then I know what I can afford to sell it for. See here."
He pulled up a book from behind the seat—a copy of "Lorna Doone" it was—and showed me the letters a m scrawled in pencil in the back.
"That means that I paid ten cents for this. Now, if you sell it for a quarter you've got a safe profit. It costs me about four dollars a week to run Parnassus—generally less. If you clear that much in six days you can afford to lay off on Sundays!"
"How do you know that a m stands for ten cents?" I asked.
"The code word's manuscript. Each letter stands for a figure, from 0 up to 9, see?" He scrawled it down on a scrap of paper:
| m | a | n | u | s | c | r | i | p | t |
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
