his mental attitude, seeing the guest had a common, human name. "I don't suppose you might be related?"
"No telling; it's a big family."
"Blowed up and killed one of the boys about your age. Aimin' to stay here some time, you said?"
"A day or two, maybe longer."
"Not much of a country for canvassin' in," Jim informed him, ready to talk to any length when he could knock the land that gave him his living. "People's comin' here in droves, but they ain't the kind to sell books or enlarged pictures to. Poor as snakes; not enough money, most of 'em, to buy grub to hold 'em over till they make a crop—if they ever do make one in this daddasted country, which I doubt like misery."
"I'm not interested in spreading either literature or art," the stranger said, his face as solemn as the back of a fiddle, Jim thought.
"I thought you might be one of them college students startin' out to sell something, they wander out here sometimes, but you're old for a student—thirty-five, I'd judge."
"You're near enough to it," Andrew Hall replied, leaving it worse than if he had said nothing at all, for all the satisfaction Jim found in it.
"Horse liniment don't go out here, nor insurance, nor chromos to hang on the wall, 'less you git 'em for advertisement, free gratis, like I got them of mine. A feller was through here last fall with foldin' lightnin' rods he carried in a valise, but he never sold none of 'em that I ever heard of."
"I don't handle them," said Hall. His face remained as solemn as before, but there was a grin in his eyes, as Jim described the humorous softening. Jim liked him a
