“How about putting him off the scent?” he said. “Give me your handkerchief.”
I did so. He hopped nimbly out, ran back down the hill (he was a spry little person in spite of his bald crown), and dropped the handkerchief on the Walton Road about a hundred feet beyond the fork. Then he followed me up the slope.
“There,” he said, grinning like a kid, “that’ll fool him. The Sage of Redfield will undoubtedly follow a false spoor and the criminals will win a good start. But I’m afraid it’s rather easy to follow a craft as unusual as Parnassus.”
“Tell me how you manage the thing,” I said. “Do you really make it pay?” We halted at the top of the hill to give Pegasus a breathing space. The terrier lay down in the dust and watched us gravely. Mr. Mifflin pulled out a pipe and begged my permission to smoke.
“It’s rather comical how I first got into it,” he said. “I was a school teacher down in Maryland. I’d been plugging away in a country school for years, on a starvation salary. I was trying to support an invalid mother, and put by something in case of storms. I remember how I used to wonder whether I’d ever be able to wear a suit that wasn’t shabby and have my shoes polished every day. Then my health went back on me. The doctor told me to get into the open air. By and by I got this idea of a travelling bookstore. I had always been a lover of books, and in the days when I boarded out among the farmers I used to read aloud to them. After my mother died I built the wagon to suit my own ideas, bought a stock of books from a big secondhand store in Baltimore, and set out. Parnassus just about saved my life I guess.”
He pushed his faded old cap back on his head and relit his pipe. I clicked to Pegasus and we rumbled gently off over the upland, looking down across the pastures. Distant cow bells sounded tankle-tonk among the bushes. Across the slope of the hill I could see the road winding away to Redfield. Somewhere along that road Andrew would be rolling back toward home and roast pork with apple sauce; and here was I, setting out on the first madness of my life without even a qualm.
“Miss McGill,” said the little man, “this rolling pavilion has been wife, doctor, and religion to me for seven years. A month ago I would have scoffed at the thought of leaving her; but somehow it’s come over me I need a change. There’s a book I’ve been yearning to write for a long time, and I need a desk steady under my elbows and a roof over my head. And silly as it seems, I’m crazy to get back to Brooklyn. My brother and I used to live there as kids. Think of walking over the old Bridge at sunset and seeing the towers of Manhattan against a red sky! And those old gray cruisers down in the Navy Yard! You don’t know how tickled I am to sell out. I’ve sold a lot of copies of your brother’s books and I’ve often thought he’d be the man to buy Parnassus if I got tired of her.”
“So he would,” I said. “Just the man. He’d be only too likely to—and go maundering about in this jaunting car and neglect the farm. But tell me about selling books. How much profit do you make out of it? We’ll be passing Mrs. Mason’s farm, by and by, and we might as well sell her something just to make a start.”
“It’s very simple,” he said. “I replenish my stock whenever I go through a big town. There’s always a secondhand 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 |
“Now, you see a m stands for 10, a n would be 12, n s is 24, a c is 15, a m m is $1.00, and so on. I don’t pay much over fifty cents for books as a rule, because country folks are shy of paying much for them. They’ll pay a lot for a separator or a buggy top, but they’ve never been taught to worry about literature! But it’s surprising how excited they get about books if you sell ’em the right kind. Over beyond Port Vigor there’s a farmer who’s waiting for me to go back—I’ve been there three or four times—and he’ll buy about five dollars’ worth if I know him. First time I went there I sold him Treasure Island, and he’s talking about it yet. I sold him Robinson Crusoe, and Little Women for his daughter, and Huck Finn, and Grubb’s book about The Potato. Last time I was
