Ajax said that whenever Mr. Bobo laughed it behooved other folk to
look grave.
"Mandy's dress costs something," I observed.
"Considerable,--I'd misremembered that. Her rig-out las' fall cost me
the vally o' three boxes o' apples--winter pearmains!"
"She will marry soon, Mr. Bobo."
"An' leave me?" he cried shrilly. "I'd like to see a man prowlin'
around my Mandy--I'd stimilate him. Besides, mister, Mandy ain't the
marryin' kind. She's homely as a mud fence, is Mandy. She ain't put up
right for huggin' and kissin'."
"But she is your heiress, Mr. Bobo."
"Heiress," he repeated with a cunning leer. "I'm poor, mister, poor.
The tax collector has eat me up--eat me up, I say, eat me up!"
He looked such an indigestible morsel, so obviously unfit for the maw
of even a tax collector, that I laughed and took my leave. He was
worth, I had reason to know, at least fifty thousand dollars.
* * * * *
"Say, Mandy, I like ye awful well! D'ye know it?"
The speaker, Mr. Rinaldo Roberts, trainer and driver of horses, was
sitting upon the top rail of the fence that divided the land of old
man Bobo from the property of the Race Track Association.
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