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devil. The suffering men, women and children looked at the immune
barber and began to cry: "Shoes!"
The necessity for the demand had been created. The demand
followed. That day Mr. Hemstetter sold three hundred pairs of shoes.
"It is really surprising," he said to Johnny, who came up in the
evening to help him straighten out the stock, "how trade is improving.
Yesterday I made only three sales. I think I shall order a dozen more
cases of goods to keep the stock up," said Mr. Hemstetter.
"I wouldn't send any orders yet," advised Johnny. "Wait till you
see how the trade continues."
Each night Johnny and Keough went out to work. At the end of
ten days two-thirds of the stock of shoes had been sold; and the stock
of cockleburrs was exhausted. Johnny send a telegram to Pink
Dawson asking him to send 500 more pounds, paying twenty cents
per pound as before. Mr.. Hemstetter wrote an order for $ 1,500
worth of shoes from Northern firms. But Johnny succeeded in
destroying the order before it reached the post-office.
That night Johnny took Rosine under a tree by Goodwin's
house and confessed everything. She looked him in the eyes, and
said: "You are a very bad man. Father and I will go back home. You
say it was a joke? I think it is a very serious matter."
But at the end of the half-an-hour's argument the conversation
had changed. The two were speaking about the colour of the wall-
paper with which the old colonial house of the Atwoods in Dalesburg
was to be decorated after the wedding.
On the next morning Johnny confessed to Mr. Hemstetter. The
shoe merchant put on his spectacles and said through them: "You are
an extraordinary young bad person. If I had not managed my business
so well, I might have lost all my money. Now, how do you propose to
sell the rest of the stock?"
When the second invoice of cockleburrs arrived, Johnny loaded
them and the remainder of the shoes into a schooner, and sailed down
the coast, where, in the same manner, he repeated his success: and
came back with a bag of money and no shoes.
And then he wrote to his government to accept his resignation.
The services of Mr. William Keough as acting consul were
suggested and accepted, and Johnny sailed with the Hemstetters back
to his native shores.