[Grafter] [Editorial] Modernize hyphenation and spelling

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@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@
 			<p>“Now, with a preacher it’s different. He can throw off his responsibilities and enjoy himself. On the 31st of May he wraps mosquito netting and tin foil around the pulpit, grabs his niblick, breviary and fishing pole and hikes for Lake Como or Atlantic City according to the size of the loudness with which he has been called by his congregation. And, sir, for three months he don’t have to think about business except to hunt around in Deuteronomy and Proverbs and Timothy to find texts to cover and exculpate such little midsummer penances as dropping a couple of looey door on rouge or teaching a Presbyterian widow to swim.</p>
 			<p>“But I was going to tell you about mine and Andy’s summer vacation that wasn’t one.</p>
 			<p>“We was tired of finance and all the branches of unsanctified ingenuity. Even Andy, whose brain rarely ever stopped working, began to make noises like a tennis cabinet.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Heigh ho!’ says Andy. ‘I’m tired. I’ve got that steam up the yacht Corsair and ho for the Riviera! feeling. I want to loaf and indict my soul, as Walt Whittier says. I want to play pinochle with Merry del Val or give a knouting to the tenants on my Tarrytown estates or do a monologue at a Chautauqua picnic in kilts or something summery and outside the line of routine and sand-bagging.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Heigh ho!’ says Andy. ‘I’m tired. I’ve got that steam up the yacht Corsair and ho for the Riviera! feeling. I want to loaf and indict my soul, as Walt Whittier says. I want to play pinochle with Merry del Val or give a knouting to the tenants on my Tarrytown estates or do a monologue at a Chautauqua picnic in kilts or something summery and outside the line of routine and sandbagging.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Patience,’ says I. ‘You’ll have to climb higher in the profession before you can taste the laurels that crown the footprints of the great captains of industry. Now, what I’d like, Andy,’ says I, ‘would be a summer sojourn in a mountain village far from scenes of larceny, labor and overcapitalization. I’m tired, too, and a month or so of sinlessness ought to leave us in good shape to begin again to take away the white man’s burdens in the fall.’</p>
 			<p>“Andy fell in with the rest cure at once, so we struck the general passenger agents of all the railroads for summer resort literature, and took a week to study out where we should go. I reckon the first passenger agent in the world was that man Genesis. But there wasn’t much competition in his day, and when he said: ‘The Lord made the earth in six days, and all very good,’ he hadn’t any idea to what extent the press agents of the summer hotels would plagiarize from him later on.</p>
 			<p>“When we finished the booklets we perceived, easy, that the United States from Passadumkeg, Maine, to El Paso, and from Skagway to Key West was a paradise of glorious mountain peaks, crystal lakes, new laid eggs, golf, girls, garages, cooling breezes, straw rides, open plumbing and tennis; and all within two hours’ ride.</p>
@@ -43,7 +43,7 @@
 			<p>“Now, I’d clean forgot to have an understanding with Andy which I was to be, the duke or the lieutenant. And I couldn’t tell from her question whether she was referring to Arctic or matrimonial expeditions. So I gave an answer that would cover both cases.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Well, ma’am,’ says I, ‘it was a freeze out⁠—right smart of a freeze out, ma’am.’</p>
 			<p>“And then the flood gates of Andy’s perorations was opened and I knew which one of the renowned ostensible guests I was supposed to be. I wasn’t either. Andy was both. And still furthermore it seemed that he was trying to be the mouthpiece of the whole British nobility and of Arctic exploration from Sir John Franklin down. It was the union of corn whiskey and the conscientious fictional form that <abbr>Mr.</abbr> W. D. Howletts admires so much.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Ladies,’ says Andy, smiling semicircularly, ‘I am truly glad to visit America. I do not consider the magna charta,’ says he, ‘or gas balloons or snow-shoes in any way a detriment to the beauty and charm of your American women, skyscrapers or the architecture of your icebergs. The next time,’ says Andy, ‘that I go after the North Pole all the Vanderbilts in Greenland won’t be able to turn me out in the cold⁠—I mean make it hot for me.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Ladies,’ says Andy, smiling semicircularly, ‘I am truly glad to visit America. I do not consider the magna charta,’ says he, ‘or gas balloons or snowshoes in any way a detriment to the beauty and charm of your American women, skyscrapers or the architecture of your icebergs. The next time,’ says Andy, ‘that I go after the North Pole all the Vanderbilts in Greenland won’t be able to turn me out in the cold⁠—I mean make it hot for me.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Tell us about one of your trips, Lieutenant,’ says one of the normals.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Sure,’ says Andy, getting the decision over a hiccup. ‘It was in the spring of last year that I sailed the Castle of Blenheim up to latitude 87 degrees Fahrenheit and beat the record. Ladies,’ says Andy, ‘it was a sad sight to see a Duke allied by a civil and liturgical chattel mortgage to one of your first families lost in a region of semiannual days.’ And then he goes on, ‘At four bells we sighted Westminster Abbey, but there was not a drop to eat. At noon we threw out five sandbags, and the ship rose fifteen knots higher. At midnight,’ continues Andy, ‘the restaurants closed. Sitting on a cake of ice we ate seven hot dogs. All around us was snow and ice. Six times a night the boatswain rose up and tore a leaf off the calendar, so we could keep time with the barometer. At 12,’ says Andy, with a lot of anguish on his face, ‘three huge polar bears sprang down the hatchway, into the cabin. And then⁠—’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘What then, Lieutenant?’ says a schoolma’am, excitedly.</p>

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@@ -17,9 +17,9 @@
 			<p>“I learned under Silver,” I said; “I don’t begrudge him the lead. But what’s your graft, son? I admit that the phantom flight of the non-existing animals at which you remarked ‘Whoa!’ has puzzled me somewhat. How do you win out on the trick?”</p>
 			<p>Buckingham Skinner blushed.</p>
 			<p>“Pocket money,” says he; “that’s all. I am temporarily unfinanced. This little coup de rye straw is good for forty dollars in a town of this size. How do I work it? Why, I involve myself, as you perceive, in the loathsome apparel of the rural dub. Thus embalmed I am Jonas Stubblefield⁠—a name impossible to improve upon. I repair noisily to the office of some loan company conveniently located in the third-floor, front. There I lay my hat and yarn gloves on the floor and ask to mortgage my farm for $2,000 to pay for my sister’s musical education in Europe. Loans like that always suit the loan companies. It’s ten to one that when the note falls due the foreclosure will be leading the semiquavers by a couple of lengths.</p>
-			<p>“Well, sir, I reach in my pocket for the abstract of title; but I suddenly hear my team running away. I run to the window and emit the word⁠—or exclamation, which-ever it may be⁠—viz, ‘Whoa!’ Then I rush down-stairs and down the street, returning in a few minutes. ‘Dang them mules,’ I says; ‘they done run away and busted the doubletree and two traces. Now I got to hoof it home, for I never brought no money along. Reckon we’ll talk about that loan some other time, gen’lemen.’</p>
+			<p>“Well, sir, I reach in my pocket for the abstract of title; but I suddenly hear my team running away. I run to the window and emit the word⁠—or exclamation, which-ever it may be⁠—viz, ‘Whoa!’ Then I rush downstairs and down the street, returning in a few minutes. ‘Dang them mules,’ I says; ‘they done run away and busted the doubletree and two traces. Now I got to hoof it home, for I never brought no money along. Reckon we’ll talk about that loan some other time, gen’lemen.’</p>
 			<p>“Then I spreads out my tarpaulin, like the Israelites, and waits for the manna to drop.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Why, no, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Stubblefield,’ says the lobster-colored party in the specs and dotted pique vest; ‘oblige us by accepting this ten-dollar bill until to-morrow. Get your harness repaired and call in at ten. We’ll be pleased to accommodate you in the matter of this loan.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Why, no, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Stubblefield,’ says the lobster-colored party in the specs and dotted pique vest; ‘oblige us by accepting this ten-dollar bill until tomorrow. Get your harness repaired and call in at ten. We’ll be pleased to accommodate you in the matter of this loan.’</p>
 			<p>“It’s a slight thing,” says Buckingham Skinner, modest, “but, as I said, only for temporary loose change.”</p>
 			<p>“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” says I, in respect for his mortification; “in case of an emergency. Of course, it’s small compared to organizing a trust or bridge whist, but even the Chicago University had to be started in a small way.”</p>
 			<p>“What’s your graft these days?” Buckingham Skinner asks me.</p>
@@ -35,43 +35,43 @@
 			<p>“A description of the sandbag, if you please,” she begins.</p>
 			<p>“Why, ma’am,” says I, “this graft of ours is so nice and refined and romantic, it would make the balcony scene in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ look like second-story work.”</p>
 			<p>We talked it over, and Miss Malloy agreed to come in as a business partner. She said she was glad to get a chance to give up her place as stenographer and secretary to a suburban lot company, and go into something respectable.</p>
-			<p>This is the way we worked our scheme. First, I figured it out by a kind of a proverb. The best grafts in the world are built up on copy-book maxims and psalms and proverbs and Esau’s fables. They seem to kind of hit off human nature. Our peaceful little swindle was constructed on the old saying: “The whole push loves a lover.”</p>
+			<p>This is the way we worked our scheme. First, I figured it out by a kind of a proverb. The best grafts in the world are built up on copybook maxims and psalms and proverbs and Esau’s fables. They seem to kind of hit off human nature. Our peaceful little swindle was constructed on the old saying: “The whole push loves a lover.”</p>
 			<p>One evening Buck and Miss Malloy drives up like blazes in a buggy to a farmer’s door. She is pale but affectionate, clinging to his arm⁠—always clinging to his arm. Any one can see that she is a peach and of the cling variety. They claim they are eloping for to be married on account of cruel parents. They ask where they can find a preacher. Farmer says, “B’gum there ain’t any preacher nigher than Reverend Abels, four miles over on Caney Creek.” Farmeress wipes her hand on her apron and rubbers through her specs.</p>
 			<p>Then, lo and look ye! Up the road from the other way jogs Parleyvoo Pickens in a gig, dressed in black, white necktie, long face, sniffing his nose, emitting a spurious kind of noise resembling the long meter doxology.</p>
 			<p>“B’jinks!” says farmer, “if thar ain’t a preacher now!”</p>
-			<p>It transpires that I am <abbr>Rev.</abbr> Abijah Green, travelling over to Little Bethel school-house for to preach next Sunday.</p>
+			<p>It transpires that I am <abbr>Rev.</abbr> Abijah Green, travelling over to Little Bethel schoolhouse for to preach next Sunday.</p>
 			<p>The young folks will have it they must be married, for pa is pursuing them with the plow mules and the buckboard. So the Reverend Green, after hesitating, marries ’em in the farmer’s parlor. And farmer grins, and has in cider, and says “B’gum!” and farmeress sniffles a bit and pats the bride on the shoulder. And Parleyvoo Pickens, the wrong reverend, writes out a marriage certificate, and farmer and farmeress sign it as witnesses. And the parties of the first, second and third part gets in their vehicles and rides away. Oh, that was an idyllic graft! True love and the lowing kine and the sun shining on the red barns⁠—it certainly had all other impostures I know about beat to a batter.</p>
-			<p>I suppose I happened along in time to marry Buck and Miss Malloy at about twenty farm-houses. I hated to think how the romance was going to fade later on when all them marriage certificates turned up in banks where we’d discounted ’em, and the farmers had to pay them notes of hand they’d signed, running from $300 to $500.</p>
+			<p>I suppose I happened along in time to marry Buck and Miss Malloy at about twenty farmhouses. I hated to think how the romance was going to fade later on when all them marriage certificates turned up in banks where we’d discounted ’em, and the farmers had to pay them notes of hand they’d signed, running from $300 to $500.</p>
 			<p>On the 15th day of May us three divided about $6,000. Miss Malloy nearly cried with joy. You don’t often see a tenderhearted girl or one that is bent on doing right.</p>
 			<p>“Boys,” says she, dabbing her eyes with a little handkerchief, “this stake comes in handier than a powder rag at a fat men’s ball. It gives me a chance to reform. I was trying to get out of the real estate business when you fellows came along. But if you hadn’t taken me in on this neat little proposition for removing the cuticle of the rutabaga propagators I’m afraid I’d have got into something worse. I was about to accept a place in one of these Women’s Auxiliary Bazars, where they build a parsonage by selling a spoonful of chicken salad and a cream-puff for seventy-five cents and calling it a Business Man’s Lunch.</p>
-			<p>“Now I can go into a square, honest business, and give all them queer jobs the shake. I’m going to Cincinnati and start a palm reading and clairvoyant joint. As Madame Saramaloi, the Egyptian Sorceress, I shall give everybody a dollar’s worth of good honest prognostication. Good-by, boys. Take my advice and go into some decent fake. Get friendly with the police and newspapers and you’ll be all right.”</p>
+			<p>“Now I can go into a square, honest business, and give all them queer jobs the shake. I’m going to Cincinnati and start a palm reading and clairvoyant joint. As Madame Saramaloi, the Egyptian Sorceress, I shall give everybody a dollar’s worth of good honest prognostication. Goodbye, boys. Take my advice and go into some decent fake. Get friendly with the police and newspapers and you’ll be all right.”</p>
 			<p>So then we all shook hands, and Miss Malloy left us. Me and Buck also rose up and sauntered off a few hundred miles; for we didn’t care to be around when them marriage certificates fell due.</p>
 			<p>With about $4,000 between us we hit that bumptious little town off the New Jersey coast they call New York.</p>
-			<p>If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson. Cosmopolitan they call it. You bet. So’s a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they’re buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. “Little old New York’s good enough for us”⁠—that’s what they sing.</p>
+			<p>If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson. Cosmopolitan they call it. You bet. So’s a piece of flypaper. You listen close when they’re buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. “Little old New York’s good enough for us”⁠—that’s what they sing.</p>
 			<p>There’s enough Reubs walk down Broadway in one hour to buy up a week’s output of the factory in Augusta, Maine, that makes Knaughty Knovelties and the little Phine Phun oroide gold finger ring that sticks a needle in your friend’s hand.</p>
 			<p>You’d think New York people was all wise; but no. They don’t get a chance to learn. Everything’s too compressed. Even the hayseeds are baled hayseeds. But what else can you expect from a town that’s shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?</p>
 			<p>It’s no place for an honest grafter with a small capital. There’s too big a protective tariff on bunco. Even when Giovanni sells a quart of warm worms and chestnut hulls he has to hand out a pint to an insectivorous cop. And the hotel man charges double for everything in the bill that he sends by the patrol wagon to the altar where the duke is about to marry the heiress.</p>
-			<p>But old Badville-near-Coney is the ideal burg for a refined piece of piracy if you can pay the bunco duty. Imported grafts come pretty high. The custom-house officers that look after it carry clubs, and it’s hard to smuggle in even a bib-and-tucker swindle to work Brooklyn with unless you can pay the toll. But now, me and Buck, having capital, descends upon New York to try and trade the metropolitan backwoodsmen a few glass beads for real estate just as the Vans did a hundred or two years ago.</p>
+			<p>But old Badville-near-Coney is the ideal burg for a refined piece of piracy if you can pay the bunco duty. Imported grafts come pretty high. The customhouse officers that look after it carry clubs, and it’s hard to smuggle in even a bib-and-tucker swindle to work Brooklyn with unless you can pay the toll. But now, me and Buck, having capital, descends upon New York to try and trade the metropolitan backwoodsmen a few glass beads for real estate just as the Vans did a hundred or two years ago.</p>
 			<p>At an East Side hotel we gets acquainted with Romulus G. Atterbury, a man with the finest head for financial operations I ever saw. It was all bald and glossy except for gray side whiskers. Seeing that head behind an office railing, and you’d deposit a million with it without a receipt. This Atterbury was well dressed, though he ate seldom; and the synopsis of his talk would make the conversation of a siren sound like a cab driver’s kick. He said he used to be a member of the Stock Exchange, but some of the big capitalists got jealous and formed a ring that forced him to sell his seat.</p>
-			<p>Atterbury got to liking me and Buck and he begun to throw on the canvas for us some of the schemes that had caused his hair to evacuate. He had one scheme for starting a National bank on $45 that made the Mississippi Bubble look as solid as a glass marble. He talked this to us for three days, and when his throat was good and sore we told him about the roll we had. Atterbury borrowed a quarter from us and went out and got a box of throat lozenges and started all over again. This time he talked bigger things, and he got us to see ’em as he did. The scheme he laid out looked like a sure winner, and he talked me and Buck into putting our capital against his burnished dome of thought. It looked all right for a kid-gloved graft. It seemed to be just about an inch and a half outside of the reach of the police, and as money-making as a mint. It was just what me and Buck wanted⁠—a regular business at a permanent stand, with an open air spieling with tonsilitis on the street corners every evening.</p>
+			<p>Atterbury got to liking me and Buck and he begun to throw on the canvas for us some of the schemes that had caused his hair to evacuate. He had one scheme for starting a National bank on $45 that made the Mississippi Bubble look as solid as a glass marble. He talked this to us for three days, and when his throat was good and sore we told him about the roll we had. Atterbury borrowed a quarter from us and went out and got a box of throat lozenges and started all over again. This time he talked bigger things, and he got us to see ’em as he did. The scheme he laid out looked like a sure winner, and he talked me and Buck into putting our capital against his burnished dome of thought. It looked all right for a kid-gloved graft. It seemed to be just about an inch and a half outside of the reach of the police, and as moneymaking as a mint. It was just what me and Buck wanted⁠—a regular business at a permanent stand, with an open air spieling with tonsilitis on the street corners every evening.</p>
 			<p>So, in six weeks you see a handsome furnished set of offices down in the Wall Street neighborhood, with “The Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company” in gilt letters on the door. And you see in his private room, with the door open, the secretary and treasurer, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Buckingham Skinner, costumed like the lilies of the conservatory, with his high silk hat close to his hand. Nobody yet ever saw Buck outside of an instantaneous reach for his hat.</p>
 			<p>And you might perceive the president and general manager, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> R. G. Atterbury, with his priceless polished poll, busy in the main office room dictating letters to a shorthand countess, who has got pomp and a pompadour that is no less than a guarantee to investors.</p>
 			<p>There is a bookkeeper and an assistant, and a general atmosphere of varnish and culpability.</p>
 			<p>At another desk the eye is relieved by the sight of an ordinary man, attired with unscrupulous plainness, sitting with his feet up, eating apples, with his obnoxious hat on the back of his head. That man is no other than Colonel Tecumseh (once “Parleyvoo”) Pickens, the vice-president of the company.</p>
-			<p>“No recherché rags for me,” I says to Atterbury, when we was organizing the stage properties of the robbery. “I’m a plain man,” says I, “and I do not use pajamas, French, or military hair-brushes. Cast me for the role of the rhinestone-in-the-rough or I don’t go on exhibition. If you can use me in my natural, though displeasing form, do so.”</p>
+			<p>“No recherché rags for me,” I says to Atterbury, when we was organizing the stage properties of the robbery. “I’m a plain man,” says I, “and I do not use pajamas, French, or military hairbrushes. Cast me for the role of the rhinestone-in-the-rough or I don’t go on exhibition. If you can use me in my natural, though displeasing form, do so.”</p>
 			<p>“Dress you up?” says Atterbury; “I should say not! Just as you are you’re worth more to the business than a whole roomful of the things they pin chrysanthemums on. You’re to play the part of the solid but disheveled capitalist from the Far West. You despise the conventions. You’ve got so many stocks you can afford to shake socks. Conservative, homely, rough, shrewd, saving⁠—that’s your pose. It’s a winner in New York. Keep your feet on the desk and eat apples. Whenever anybody comes in eat an apple. Let ’em see you stuff the peelings in a drawer of your desk. Look as economical and rich and rugged as you can.”</p>
 			<p>I followed out Atterbury’s instructions. I played the Rocky Mountain capitalist without ruching or frills. The way I deposited apple peelings to my credit in a drawer when any customers came in made Hetty Green look like a spendthrift. I could hear Atterbury saying to victims, as he smiled at me, indulgent and venerating, “That’s our vice-president, Colonel Pickens … fortune in Western investments … delightfully plain manners, but … could sign his check for half a million … simple as a child … wonderful head … conservative and careful almost to a fault.”</p>
-			<p>Atterbury managed the business. Me and Buck never quite understood all of it, though he explained it to us in full. It seems the company was a kind of cooperative one, and everybody that bought stock shared in the profits. First, we officers bought up a controlling interest⁠—we had to have that⁠—of the shares at 50 cents a hundred⁠—just what the printer charged us⁠—and the rest went to the public at a dollar each. The company guaranteed the stockholders a profit of ten per cent. each month, payable on the last day thereof.</p>
+			<p>Atterbury managed the business. Me and Buck never quite understood all of it, though he explained it to us in full. It seems the company was a kind of cooperative one, and everybody that bought stock shared in the profits. First, we officers bought up a controlling interest⁠—we had to have that⁠—of the shares at 50 cents a hundred⁠—just what the printer charged us⁠—and the rest went to the public at a dollar each. The company guaranteed the stockholders a profit of ten percent each month, payable on the last day thereof.</p>
 			<p>When any stockholder had paid in as much as $100, the company issued him a Gold Bond and he became a bondholder. I asked Atterbury one day what benefits and appurtenances these Gold Bonds was to an investor more so than the immunities and privileges enjoyed by the common sucker who only owned stock. Atterbury picked up one of them Gold Bonds, all gilt and lettered up with flourishes and a big red seal tied with a blue ribbon in a bowknot, and he looked at me like his feelings was hurt.</p>
-			<p>“My dear Colonel Pickens,” says he, “you have no soul for Art. Think of a thousand homes made happy by possessing one of these beautiful gems of the lithographer’s skill! Think of the joy in the household where one of these Gold Bonds hangs by a pink cord to the what-not, or is chewed by the baby, caroling gleefully upon the floor! Ah, I see your eye growing moist, Colonel⁠—I have touched you, have I not?”</p>
+			<p>“My dear Colonel Pickens,” says he, “you have no soul for Art. Think of a thousand homes made happy by possessing one of these beautiful gems of the lithographer’s skill! Think of the joy in the household where one of these Gold Bonds hangs by a pink cord to the whatnot, or is chewed by the baby, caroling gleefully upon the floor! Ah, I see your eye growing moist, Colonel⁠—I have touched you, have I not?”</p>
 			<p>“You have not,” says I, “for I’ve been watching you. The moisture you see is apple juice. You can’t expect one man to act as a human cider-press and an art connoisseur too.”</p>
-			<p>Atterbury attended to the details of the concern. As I understand it, they was simple. The investors in stock paid in their money, and⁠—well, I guess that’s all they had to do. The company received it, and⁠—I don’t call to mind anything else. Me and Buck knew more about selling corn salve than we did about Wall Street, but even we could see how the Golconda Gold Bond Investment Company was making money. You take in money and pay back ten per cent. of it; it’s plain enough that you make a clean, legitimate profit of 90 per cent., less expenses, as long as the fish bite.</p>
+			<p>Atterbury attended to the details of the concern. As I understand it, they was simple. The investors in stock paid in their money, and⁠—well, I guess that’s all they had to do. The company received it, and⁠—I don’t call to mind anything else. Me and Buck knew more about selling corn salve than we did about Wall Street, but even we could see how the Golconda Gold Bond Investment Company was making money. You take in money and pay back ten percent of it; it’s plain enough that you make a clean, legitimate profit of 90 percent., less expenses, as long as the fish bite.</p>
 			<p>Atterbury wanted to be president and treasurer too, but Buck winks an eye at him and says: “You was to furnish the brains. Do you call it good brain work when you propose to take in money at the door, too? Think again. I hereby nominate myself treasurer ad valorem, sine die, and by acclamation. I chip in that much brain work free. Me and Pickens, we furnished the capital, and we’ll handle the unearned increment as it incremates.”</p>
 			<p>It costs us $500 for office rent and first payment on furniture; $1,500 more went for printing and advertising. Atterbury knew his business. “Three months to a minute we’ll last,” says he. “A day longer than that and we’ll have to either go under or go under an alias. By that time we ought to clean up $60,000. And then a money belt and a lower berth for me, and the yellow journals and the furniture men can pick the bones.”</p>
 			<p>Our ads. done the work. “Country weeklies and Washington hand-press dailies, of course,” says I when we was ready to make contracts.</p>
-			<p>“Man,” says Atterbury, “as its advertising manager you would cause a Limburger cheese factory to remain undiscovered during a hot summer. The game we’re after is right here in New York and Brooklyn and the Harlem reading-rooms. They’re the people that the street-car fenders and the Answers to Correspondents columns and the pickpocket notices are made for. We want our ads. in the biggest city dailies, top of column, next to editorials on radium and pictures of the girl doing health exercises.”</p>
+			<p>“Man,” says Atterbury, “as its advertising manager you would cause a Limburger cheese factory to remain undiscovered during a hot summer. The game we’re after is right here in New York and Brooklyn and the Harlem reading-rooms. They’re the people that the streetcar fenders and the Answers to Correspondents columns and the pickpocket notices are made for. We want our ads. in the biggest city dailies, top of column, next to editorials on radium and pictures of the girl doing health exercises.”</p>
 			<p>Pretty soon the money begins to roll in. Buck didn’t have to pretend to be busy; his desk was piled high up with money orders and checks and greenbacks. People began to drop in the office and buy stock every day.</p>
-			<p>Most of the shares went in small amounts⁠—$10 and $25 and $50, and a good many $2 and $3 lots. And the bald and inviolate cranium of President Atterbury shines with enthusiasm and demerit, while Colonel Tecumseh Pickens, the rude but reputable Crœsus of the West, consumes so many apples that the peelings hang to the floor from the mahogany garbage chest that he calls his desk.</p>
+			<p>Most of the shares went in small amounts⁠—$10 and $25 and $50, and a good many $2 and $3 lots. And the bald and inviolate cranium of President Atterbury shines with enthusiasm and demerit, while Colonel Tecumseh Pickens, the rude but reputable Croesus of the West, consumes so many apples that the peelings hang to the floor from the mahogany garbage chest that he calls his desk.</p>
 			<p>Just as Atterbury said, we ran along about three months without being troubled. Buck cashed the paper as fast as it came in and kept the money in a safe deposit vault a block or so away. Buck never thought much of banks for such purposes. We paid the interest regular on the stock we’d sold, so there was nothing for anybody to squeal about. We had nearly $50,000 on hand and all three of us had been living as high as prize fighters out of training.</p>
 			<p>One morning, as me and Buck sauntered into the office, fat and flippant, from our noon grub, we met an easy-looking fellow, with a bright eye and a pipe in his mouth, coming out. We found Atterbury looking like he’d been caught a mile from home in a wet shower.</p>
 			<p>“Know that man?” he asked us.</p>
@@ -82,7 +82,7 @@
 			<p>Me and Buck talked to Atterbury and got him to stop sweating and stand still. That fellow didn’t look like a reporter to us. Reporters always pull out a pencil and tablet on you, and tell you a story you’ve heard, and strikes you for the drinks. But Atterbury was shaky and nervous all day.</p>
 			<p>The next day me and Buck comes down from the hotel about ten-thirty. On the way we buys the papers, and the first thing we see is a column on the front page about our little imposition. It was a shame the way that reporter intimated that we were no blood relatives of the late George W. Childs. He tells all about the scheme as he sees it, in a rich, racy kind of a guying style that might amuse most anybody except a stockholder. Yes, Atterbury was right; it behooveth the gaily clad treasurer and the pearly pated president and the rugged vice-president of the Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company to go away real sudden and quick that their days might be longer upon the land.</p>
 			<p>Me and Buck hurries down to the office. We finds on the stairs and in the hall a crowd of people trying to squeeze into our office, which is already jammed full inside to the railing. They’ve nearly all got Golconda stock and Gold Bonds in their hands. Me and Buck judged they’d been reading the papers, too.</p>
-			<p>We stopped and looked at our stockholders, some surprised. It wasn’t quite the kind of a gang we supposed had been investing. They all looked like poor people; there was plenty of old women and lots of young girls that you’d say worked in factories and mills. Some was old men that looked like war veterans, and some was crippled, and a good many was just kids⁠—bootblacks and newsboys and messengers. Some was working-men in overalls, with their sleeves rolled up. Not one of the gang looked like a stockholder in anything unless it was a peanut stand. But they all had Golconda stock and looked as sick as you please.</p>
+			<p>We stopped and looked at our stockholders, some surprised. It wasn’t quite the kind of a gang we supposed had been investing. They all looked like poor people; there was plenty of old women and lots of young girls that you’d say worked in factories and mills. Some was old men that looked like war veterans, and some was crippled, and a good many was just kids⁠—bootblacks and newsboys and messengers. Some was workingmen in overalls, with their sleeves rolled up. Not one of the gang looked like a stockholder in anything unless it was a peanut stand. But they all had Golconda stock and looked as sick as you please.</p>
 			<p>I saw a queer kind of a pale look come on Buck’s face when he sized up the crowd. He stepped up to a sickly looking woman and says: “Madam, do you own any of this stock?”</p>
 			<p>“I put in a hundred dollars,” says the woman, faint like. “It was all I had saved in a year. One of my children is dying at home now and I haven’t a cent in the house. I came to see if I could draw out some. The circulars said you could draw it at any time. But they say now I will lose it all.”</p>
 			<p>There was a smart kind of kid in the gang⁠—I guess he was a newsboy. “I got in twenty-fi’, mister,” he says, looking hopeful at Buck’s silk hat and clothes. “Dey paid me two-fifty a mont’ on it. Say, a man tells me dey can’t do dat and be on de square. Is dat straight? Do you guess I can get out my twenty-fi’?”</p>
@@ -97,20 +97,20 @@
 			<p>“Pick,” says he, looking at me hard, “ain’t this graft a little out of our line? Do we want Jakey to marry Rosa Steinfeld?”</p>
 			<p>“You’ve got my vote,” says I. “I’ll have it here in ten minutes.” And I starts for the safe deposit vaults.</p>
 			<p>I comes back with the money done up in a big bundle, and then Buck and me takes the journalist reporter around to another door and we let ourselves into one of the office rooms.</p>
-			<p>“Now, my literary friend,” says Buck, “take a chair, and keep still, and I’ll give you an interview. You see before you two grafters from Graftersville, Grafter County, Arkansas. Me and Pick have sold brass jewelry, hair tonic, song books, marked cards, patent medicines, Connecticut Smyrna rugs, furniture polish, and albums in every town from Old Point Comfort to the Golden Gate. We’ve grafted a dollar whenever we saw one that had a surplus look to it. But we never went after the simoleon in the toe of the sock under the loose brick in the corner of the kitchen hearth. There’s an old saying you may have heard⁠—‘fussily decency averni’⁠—which means it’s an easy slide from the street faker’s dry goods box to a desk in Wall Street. We’ve took that slide, but we didn’t know exactly what was at the bottom of it. Now, you ought to be wise, but you ain’t. You’ve got New York wiseness, which means that you judge a man by the outside of his clothes. That ain’t right. You ought to look at the lining and seams and the button-holes. While we are waiting for the patrol wagon you might get out your little stub pencil and take notes for another funny piece in the paper.”</p>
+			<p>“Now, my literary friend,” says Buck, “take a chair, and keep still, and I’ll give you an interview. You see before you two grafters from Graftersville, Grafter County, Arkansas. Me and Pick have sold brass jewelry, hair tonic, song books, marked cards, patent medicines, Connecticut Smyrna rugs, furniture polish, and albums in every town from Old Point Comfort to the Golden Gate. We’ve grafted a dollar whenever we saw one that had a surplus look to it. But we never went after the simoleon in the toe of the sock under the loose brick in the corner of the kitchen hearth. There’s an old saying you may have heard⁠—‘fussily decency averni’⁠—which means it’s an easy slide from the street faker’s dry goods box to a desk in Wall Street. We’ve took that slide, but we didn’t know exactly what was at the bottom of it. Now, you ought to be wise, but you ain’t. You’ve got New York wiseness, which means that you judge a man by the outside of his clothes. That ain’t right. You ought to look at the lining and seams and the buttonholes. While we are waiting for the patrol wagon you might get out your little stub pencil and take notes for another funny piece in the paper.”</p>
 			<p>And then Buck turns to me and says: “I don’t care what Atterbury thinks. He only put in brains, and if he gets his capital out he’s lucky. But what do you say, Pick?”</p>
 			<p>“Me?” says I. “You ought to know me, Buck. I didn’t know who was buying the stock.”</p>
 			<p>“All right,” says Buck. And then he goes through the inside door into the main office and looks at the gang trying to squeeze through the railing. Atterbury and his hat was gone. And Buck makes ’em a short speech.</p>
 			<p>“All you lambs get in line. You’re going to get your wool back. Don’t shove so. Get in a line⁠—a <em>line</em>⁠—not in a pile. Lady, will you please stop bleating? Your money’s waiting for you. Here, sonny, don’t climb over that railing; your dimes are safe. Don’t cry, sis; you ain’t out a cent. Get in <em>line</em>, I say. Here, Pick, come and straighten ’em out and let ’em through and out by the other door.”</p>
 			<p>Buck takes off his coat, pushes his silk hat on the back of his head, and lights up a reina victoria. He sets at the table with the boodle before him, all done up in neat packages. I gets the stockholders strung out and marches ’em, single file, through from the main room; and the reporter man passes ’em out of the side door into the hall again. As they go by, Buck takes up the stock and the Gold Bonds, paying ’em cash, dollar for dollar, the same as they paid in. The shareholders of the Golconda Gold Bond and Investment Company can’t hardly believe it. They almost grabs the money out of Buck’s hands. Some of the women keep on crying, for it’s a custom of the sex to cry when they have sorrow, to weep when they have joy, and to shed tears whenever they find themselves without either.</p>
 			<p>The old women’s fingers shake when they stuff the skads in the bosom of their rusty dresses. The factory girls just stoop over and flap their dry goods a second, and you hear the elastic go “pop” as the currency goes down in the ladies’ department of the “Old Domestic Lisle-Thread Bank.”</p>
-			<p>Some of the stockholders that had been doing the Jeremiah act the loudest outside had spasms of restored confidence and wanted to leave the money invested. “Salt away that chicken feed in your duds, and skip along,” says Buck. “What business have you got investing in bonds? The tea-pot or the crack in the wall behind the clock for your hoard of pennies.”</p>
+			<p>Some of the stockholders that had been doing the Jeremiah act the loudest outside had spasms of restored confidence and wanted to leave the money invested. “Salt away that chicken feed in your duds, and skip along,” says Buck. “What business have you got investing in bonds? The teapot or the crack in the wall behind the clock for your hoard of pennies.”</p>
 			<p>When the pretty girl in the red shawl cashes in Buck hands her an extra twenty.</p>
 			<p>“A wedding present,” says our treasurer, “from the Golconda Company. And say⁠—if Jakey ever follows his nose, even at a respectful distance, around the corner where Rosa Steinfeld lives, you are hereby authorized to knock a couple of inches of it off.”</p>
 			<p>When they was all paid off and gone, Buck calls the newspaper reporter and shoves the rest of the money over to him.</p>
-			<p>“You begun this,” says Buck; “now finish it. Over there are the books, showing every share and bond issued. Here’s the money to cover, except what we’ve spent to live on. You’ll have to act as receiver. I guess you’ll do the square thing on account of your paper. This is the best way we know how to settle it. Me and our substantial but apple-weary vice-president are going to follow the example of our revered president, and skip. Now, have you got enough news for to-day, or do you want to interview us on etiquette and the best way to make over an old taffeta skirt?”</p>
+			<p>“You begun this,” says Buck; “now finish it. Over there are the books, showing every share and bond issued. Here’s the money to cover, except what we’ve spent to live on. You’ll have to act as receiver. I guess you’ll do the square thing on account of your paper. This is the best way we know how to settle it. Me and our substantial but apple-weary vice-president are going to follow the example of our revered president, and skip. Now, have you got enough news for today, or do you want to interview us on etiquette and the best way to make over an old taffeta skirt?”</p>
 			<p>“News!” says the newspaper man, taking his pipe out; “do you think I could use this? I don’t want to lose my job. Suppose I go around to the office and tell ’em this happened. What’ll the managing editor say? He’ll just hand me a pass to Bellevue and tell me to come back when I get cured. I might turn in a story about a sea serpent wiggling up Broadway, but I haven’t got the nerve to try ’em with a pipe like this. A get-rich-quick scheme⁠—excuse me⁠—gang giving back the boodle! Oh, no. I’m not on the comic supplement.”</p>
-			<p>“You can’t understand it, of course,” says Buck, with his hand on the door knob. “Me and Pick ain’t Wall Streeters like you know ’em. We never allowed to swindle sick old women and working girls and take nickels off of kids. In the lines of graft we’ve worked we took money from the people the Lord made to be buncoed⁠—sports and rounders and smart Alecks and street crowds, that always have a few dollars to throw away, and farmers that wouldn’t ever be happy if the grafters didn’t come around and play with ’em when they sold their crops. We never cared to fish for the kind of suckers that bite here. No, sir. We got too much respect for the profession and for ourselves. Good-by to you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Receiver.”</p>
+			<p>“You can’t understand it, of course,” says Buck, with his hand on the door knob. “Me and Pick ain’t Wall Streeters like you know ’em. We never allowed to swindle sick old women and working girls and take nickels off of kids. In the lines of graft we’ve worked we took money from the people the Lord made to be buncoed⁠—sports and rounders and smart Alecks and street crowds, that always have a few dollars to throw away, and farmers that wouldn’t ever be happy if the grafters didn’t come around and play with ’em when they sold their crops. We never cared to fish for the kind of suckers that bite here. No, sir. We got too much respect for the profession and for ourselves. Goodbye to you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Receiver.”</p>
 			<p>“Here!” says the journalist reporter; “wait a minute. There’s a broker I know on the next floor. Wait till I put this truck in his safe. I want you fellows to take a drink on me before you go.”</p>
 			<p>“On you?” says Buck, winking solemn. “Don’t you go and try to make ’em believe at the office you said that. Thanks. We can’t spare the time, I reckon. So long.”</p>
 			<p>And me and Buck slides out the door; and that’s the way the Golconda Company went into involuntary liquefaction.</p>

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@@ -51,7 +51,7 @@
 			<p>“One used to stop his automobile in front of our hotel and have a quart of champagne brought out to him. When the waiter opened it he’d turn it up to his mouth and drink it out of the bottle. That showed he used to be a glassblower before he made his money.</p>
 			<p>“One evening Andy failed to come to the hotel for dinner. About 11 o’clock he came into my room.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Landed one, Jeff,’ says he. ‘Twelve millions. Oil, rolling mills, real estate and natural gas. He’s a fine man; no airs about him. Made all his money in the last five years. He’s got professors posting him up now in education⁠—art and literature and haberdashery and such things.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘When I saw him he’d just won a bet of $10,000 with a Steel Corporation man that there’d be four suicides in the Allegheny rolling mills to-day. So everybody in sight had to walk up and have drinks on him. He took a fancy to me and asked me to dinner with him. We went to a restaurant in Diamond alley and sat on stools and had a sparkling Moselle and clam chowder and apple fritters.</p>
+			<p>“ ‘When I saw him he’d just won a bet of $10,000 with a Steel Corporation man that there’d be four suicides in the Allegheny rolling mills today. So everybody in sight had to walk up and have drinks on him. He took a fancy to me and asked me to dinner with him. We went to a restaurant in Diamond alley and sat on stools and had a sparkling Moselle and clam chowder and apple fritters.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Then he wanted to show me his bachelor apartment on Liberty street. He’s got ten rooms over a fish market with privilege of the bath on the next floor above. He told me it cost him $18,000 to furnish his apartment, and I believe it.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘He’s got $40,000 worth of pictures in one room, and $20,000 worth of curios and antiques in another. His name’s Scudder, and he’s 45, and taking lessons on the piano and 15,000 barrels of oil a day out of his wells.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘All right,’ says I. ‘Preliminary canter satisfactory. But, kay vooly, voo? What good is the art junk to us? And the oil?’</p>
@@ -76,7 +76,7 @@
 			<p>“ ‘Well, the great ice jams, Profess!’ says Scudder. ‘Have you found the other one? Me sell? No. I don’t guess Cornelius Scudder needs to sell anything that he wants to keep. Have you got the carving with you, Profess?’</p>
 			<p>“I shows it to Scudder. He examines it careful all over.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘It’s the article,’ says he. ‘It’s a duplicate of mine, every line and curve of it. Tell you what I’ll do,’ he says. ‘I won’t sell, but I’ll buy. Give you $2,500 for yours.’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Since you won’t sell, I will,’ says I. ‘Large bills, please. I’m a man of few words. I must return to New York to-night. I lecture to-morrow at the aquarium.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Since you won’t sell, I will,’ says I. ‘Large bills, please. I’m a man of few words. I must return to New York tonight. I lecture tomorrow at the aquarium.’</p>
 			<p>“Scudder sends a check down and the hotel cashes it. He goes off with his piece of antiquity and I hurry back to Andy’s hotel, according to arrangement.</p>
 			<p>“Andy is walking up and down the room looking at his watch.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Well?’ he says.</p>

src/epub/text/hostages-to-momus.xhtml

@@ -13,11 +13,11 @@
 				<p>I never got inside of the legitimate line of graft but once. But, one time, as I say, I reversed the decision of the revised statutes and undertook a thing that I’d have to apologize for even under the New Jersey trust laws.</p>
 				<p>Me and Caligula Polk, of Muskogee in the Creek Nation, was down in the Mexican State of Tamaulipas running a peripatetic lottery and monte game. Now, selling lottery tickets is a government graft in Mexico, just like selling forty-eight cents’ worth of postage-stamps for forty-nine cents is over here. So Uncle Porfirio he instructs the rurales to attend to our case.</p>
 				<p>Rurales? They’re a sort of country police; but don’t draw any mental crayon portraits of the worthy constables with a tin star and a gray goatee. The rurales⁠—well, if we’d mount our Supreme Court on broncos, arm ’em with Winchesters, and start ’em out after John Doe et al. we’d have about the same thing.</p>
-				<p>When the rurales started for us we started for the States. They chased us as far as Matamoras. We hid in a brickyard; and that night we swum the Rio Grande, Caligula with a brick in each hand, absent-minded, which he drops upon the soil of Texas, forgetting he had ’em.</p>
+				<p>When the rurales started for us we started for the States. They chased us as far as Matamoras. We hid in a brickyard; and that night we swum the Rio Grande, Caligula with a brick in each hand, absentminded, which he drops upon the soil of Texas, forgetting he had ’em.</p>
 				<p>From there we emigrated to San Antone, and then over to New Orleans, where we took a rest. And in that town of cotton bales and other adjuncts to female beauty we made the acquaintance of drinks invented by the Creoles during the period of Louey Cans, in which they are still served at the side doors. The most I can remember of this town is that me and Caligula and a Frenchman named McCarty⁠—wait a minute; Adolph McCarty⁠—was trying to make the French Quarter pay up the back trading-stamps due on the Louisiana Purchase, when somebody hollers that the johndarms are coming. I have an insufficient recollection of buying two yellow tickets through a window; and I seemed to see a man swing a lantern and say “All aboard!” I remembered no more, except that the train butcher was covering me and Caligula up with Augusta J. Evans’s works and figs.</p>
-				<p>When we become revised, we find that we have collided up against the State of Georgia at a spot hitherto unaccounted for in time tables except by an asterisk, which means that trains stop every other Thursday on signal by tearing up a rail. We was waked up in a yellow pine hotel by the noise of flowers and the smell of birds. Yes, sir, for the wind was banging sunflowers as big as buggy wheels against the weatherboarding and the chicken coop was right under the window. Me and Caligula dressed and went down-stairs. The landlord was shelling peas on the front porch. He was six feet of chills and fever, and Hongkong in complexion though in other respects he seemed amenable in the exercise of his sentiments and features.</p>
+				<p>When we become revised, we find that we have collided up against the State of Georgia at a spot hitherto unaccounted for in time tables except by an asterisk, which means that trains stop every other Thursday on signal by tearing up a rail. We was waked up in a yellow pine hotel by the noise of flowers and the smell of birds. Yes, sir, for the wind was banging sunflowers as big as buggy wheels against the weatherboarding and the chicken coop was right under the window. Me and Caligula dressed and went downstairs. The landlord was shelling peas on the front porch. He was six feet of chills and fever, and Hongkong in complexion though in other respects he seemed amenable in the exercise of his sentiments and features.</p>
 				<p>Caligula, who is a spokesman by birth, and a small man, though red-haired and impatient of painfulness of any kind, speaks up.</p>
-				<p>“Pardner,” says he, “good-morning, and be darned to you. Would you mind telling us why we are at? We know the reason we are where, but can’t exactly figure out on account of at what place.”</p>
+				<p>“Pardner,” says he, “good morning, and be darned to you. Would you mind telling us why we are at? We know the reason we are where, but can’t exactly figure out on account of at what place.”</p>
 				<p>“Well, gentlemen,” says the landlord, “I reckoned you-all would be inquiring this morning. You-all dropped off of the nine-thirty train here last night; and you was right tight. Yes, you was right smart in liquor. I can inform you that you are now in the town of Mountain Valley, in the State of Georgia.”</p>
 				<p>“On top of that,” says Caligula, “don’t say that we can’t have anything to eat.”</p>
 				<p>“Sit down, gentlemen,” says the landlord, “and in twenty minutes I’ll call you to the best breakfast you can get anywhere in town.”</p>
@@ -27,8 +27,8 @@
 				<p>“Then,” says Caligula, “they ought to keep it where it belongs. I thought this was a hotel and not a stable. Now, if we was in Muskogee at the <abbr>St.</abbr> Lucifer House, I’d show you some breakfast grub. Antelope steaks and fried liver to begin on, and venison cutlets with chili con carne and pineapple fritters, and then some sardines and mixed pickles; and top it off with a can of yellow clings and a bottle of beer. You won’t find a layout like that on the bill of affairs of any of your Eastern restauraws.”</p>
 				<p>“Too lavish,” says I. “I’ve traveled, and I’m unprejudiced. There’ll never be a perfect breakfast eaten until some man grows arms long enough to stretch down to New Orleans for his coffee and over to Norfolk for his rolls, and reaches up to Vermont and digs a slice of butter out of a spring-house, and then turns over a beehive close to a white clover patch out in Indiana for the rest. Then he’d come pretty close to making a meal on the amber that the gods eat on Mount Olympia.”</p>
 				<p>“Too ephemeral,” says Caligula. “I’d want ham and eggs, or rabbit stew, anyhow, for a chaser. What do you consider the most edifying and casual in the way of a dinner?”</p>
-				<p>“I’ve been infatuated from time to time,” I answers, “with fancy ramifications of grub such as terrapins, lobsters, reed birds, jambolaya, and canvas-covered ducks; but after all there’s nothing less displeasing to me than a beefsteak smothered in mushrooms on a balcony in sound of the Broadway streetcars, with a hand-organ playing down below, and the boys hollering extras about the latest suicide. For the wine, give me a reasonable Ponty Cany. And that’s all, except a demi-tasse.”</p>
-				<p>“Well,” says Caligula, “I reckon in New York you get to be a conniseer; and when you go around with the demi-tasse you are naturally bound to buy ’em stylish grub.”</p>
+				<p>“I’ve been infatuated from time to time,” I answers, “with fancy ramifications of grub such as terrapins, lobsters, reed birds, jambolaya, and canvas-covered ducks; but after all there’s nothing less displeasing to me than a beefsteak smothered in mushrooms on a balcony in sound of the Broadway streetcars, with a hand-organ playing down below, and the boys hollering extras about the latest suicide. For the wine, give me a reasonable Ponty Cany. And that’s all, except a demitasse.”</p>
+				<p>“Well,” says Caligula, “I reckon in New York you get to be a conniseer; and when you go around with the demitasse you are naturally bound to buy ’em stylish grub.”</p>
 				<p>“It’s a great town for epicures,” says I. “You’d soon fall into their ways if you was there.”</p>
 				<p>“I’ve heard it was,” says Caligula. “But I reckon I wouldn’t. I can polish my fingernails all they need myself.”</p>
 			</section>
@@ -37,25 +37,25 @@
 				<p>After breakfast we went out on the front porch, lighted up two of the landlord’s <i xml:lang="es">flor de upas</i> perfectos, and took a look at Georgia.</p>
 				<p>The installment of scenery visible to the eye looked mighty poor. As far as we could see was red hills all washed down with gullies and scattered over with patches of piny woods. Blackberry bushes was all that kept the rail fences from falling down. About fifteen miles over to the north was a little range of well-timbered mountains.</p>
 				<p>That town of Mountain Valley wasn’t going. About a dozen people permeated along the sidewalks; but what you saw mostly was rain-barrels and roosters, and boys poking around with sticks in piles of ashes made by burning the scenery of Uncle Tom shows.</p>
-				<p>And just then there passes down on the other side of the street a high man in a long black coat and a beaver hat. All the people in sight bowed, and some crossed the street to shake hands with him; folks came out of stores and houses to holler at him; women leaned out of windows and smiled; and all the kids stopped playing to look at him. Our landlord stepped out on the porch and bent himself double like a carpenter’s rule, and sung out, “Good-morning, Colonel,” when he was a dozen yards gone by.</p>
+				<p>And just then there passes down on the other side of the street a high man in a long black coat and a beaver hat. All the people in sight bowed, and some crossed the street to shake hands with him; folks came out of stores and houses to holler at him; women leaned out of windows and smiled; and all the kids stopped playing to look at him. Our landlord stepped out on the porch and bent himself double like a carpenter’s rule, and sung out, “Good morning, Colonel,” when he was a dozen yards gone by.</p>
 				<p>“And is that Alexander, pa?” says Caligula to the landlord; “and why is he called great?”</p>
 				<p>“That, gentlemen,” says the landlord, “is no less than Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham, the president of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad, mayor of Mountain Valley, and chairman of the Perry County board of immigration and public improvements.”</p>
 				<p>“Been away a good many years, hasn’t he?” I asked.</p>
 				<p>“No, sir; Colonel Rockingham is going down to the post-office for his mail. His fellow-citizens take pleasure in greeting him thus every morning. The colonel is our most prominent citizen. Besides the height of the stock of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad, he owns a thousand acres of that land across the creek. Mountain Valley delights, sir, to honor a citizen of such worth and public spirit.”</p>
-				<p>For an hour that afternoon Caligula sat on the back of his neck on the porch and studied a newspaper, which was unusual in a man who despised print. When he was through he took me to the end of the porch among the sunlight and drying dish-towels. I knew that Caligula had invented a new graft. For he chewed the ends of his mustache and ran the left catch of his suspenders up and down, which was his way.</p>
+				<p>For an hour that afternoon Caligula sat on the back of his neck on the porch and studied a newspaper, which was unusual in a man who despised print. When he was through he took me to the end of the porch among the sunlight and drying dishtowels. I knew that Caligula had invented a new graft. For he chewed the ends of his mustache and ran the left catch of his suspenders up and down, which was his way.</p>
 				<p>“What is it now?” I asks. “Just so it ain’t floating mining stocks or raising Pennsylvania pinks, we’ll talk it over.”</p>
 				<p>“Pennsylvania pinks? Oh, that refers to a coin-raising scheme of the Keystoners. They burn the soles of old women’s feet to make them tell where their money’s hid.”</p>
 				<p>Caligula’s words in business was always few and bitter.</p>
 				<p>“You see them mountains,” said he, pointing. “And you seen that colonel man that owns railroads and cuts more ice when he goes to the post-office than Roosevelt does when he cleans ’em out. What we’re going to do is to kidnap the latter into the former, and inflict a ransom of ten thousand dollars.”</p>
 				<p>“Illegality,” says I, shaking my head.</p>
-				<p>“I knew you’d say that,” says Caligula. “At first sight it does seem to jar peace and dignity. But it don’t. I got the idea out of that newspaper. Would you commit aspersions on a equitable graft that the United States itself has condoned and indorsed and ratified?”</p>
+				<p>“I knew you’d say that,” says Caligula. “At first sight it does seem to jar peace and dignity. But it don’t. I got the idea out of that newspaper. Would you commit aspersions on a equitable graft that the United States itself has condoned and endorsed and ratified?”</p>
 				<p>“Kidnapping,” says I, “is an immoral function in the derogatory list of the statutes. If the United States upholds it, it must be a recent enactment of ethics, along with race suicide and rural delivery.”</p>
 				<p>“Listen,” says Caligula, “and I’ll explain the case set down in the papers. Here was a Greek citizen named Burdick Harris,” says he, “captured for a graft by Africans; and the United States sends two gunboats to the State of Tangiers and makes the King of Morocco give up seventy thousand dollars to Raisuli.”</p>
 				<p>“Go slow,” says I. “That sounds too international to take in all at once. It’s like ‘thimble, thimble, who’s got the naturalization papers?’ ”</p>
-				<p>“ ’Twas press despatches from Constantinople,” says Caligula. “You’ll see, six months from now. They’ll be confirmed by the monthly magazines; and then it won’t be long till you’ll notice ’em alongside the photos of the Mount Pelee eruption photos in the while-you-get-your-hair-cut weeklies. It’s all right, Pick. This African man Raisuli hides Burdick Harris up in the mountains, and advertises his price to the governments of different nations. Now, you wouldn’t think for a minute,” goes on Caligula, “that John Hay would have chipped in and helped this graft along if it wasn’t a square game, would you?”</p>
+				<p>“ ’Twas press despatches from Constantinople,” says Caligula. “You’ll see, six months from now. They’ll be confirmed by the monthly magazines; and then it won’t be long till you’ll notice ’em alongside the photos of the Mount Pelee eruption photos in the while-you-get-your-haircut weeklies. It’s all right, Pick. This African man Raisuli hides Burdick Harris up in the mountains, and advertises his price to the governments of different nations. Now, you wouldn’t think for a minute,” goes on Caligula, “that John Hay would have chipped in and helped this graft along if it wasn’t a square game, would you?”</p>
 				<p>“Why, no,” says I. “I’ve always stood right in with Bryan’s policies, and I couldn’t consciously say a word against the Republican administration just now. But if Harris was a Greek, on what system of international protocols did Hay interfere?”</p>
 				<p>“It ain’t exactly set forth in the papers,” says Caligula. “I suppose it’s a matter of sentiment. You know he wrote this poem, ‘Little Breeches’; and them Greeks wear little or none. But anyhow, John Hay sends the Brooklyn and the Olympia over, and they cover Africa with thirty-inch guns. And then Hay cables after the health of the persona grata. ‘And how are they this morning?’ he wires. ‘Is Burdick Harris alive yet, or <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Raisuli dead?’ And the King of Morocco sends up the seventy thousand dollars, and they turn Burdick Harris loose. And there’s not half the hard feelings among the nations about this little kidnapping matter as there was about the peace congress. And Burdick Harris says to the reporters, in the Greek language, that he’s often heard about the United States, and he admires Roosevelt next to Raisuli, who is one of the whitest and most gentlemanly kidnappers that he ever worked alongside of. So you see, Pick,” winds up Caligula, “we’ve got the law of nations on our side. We’ll cut this colonel man out of the herd, and corral him in them little mountains, and stick up his heirs and assigns for ten thousand dollars.”</p>
-				<p>“Well, you seldom little red-headed territorial terror,” I answers, “you can’t bluff your uncle Tecumseh Pickens! I’ll be your company in this graft. But I misdoubt if you’ve absorbed the inwardness of this Burdick Harris case, Calig; and if on any morning we get a telegram from the Secretary of State asking about the health of the scheme, I propose to acquire the most propinquitous and celeritous mule in this section and gallop diplomatically over into the neighboring and peaceful nation of Alabama.”</p>
+				<p>“Well, you seldom little redheaded territorial terror,” I answers, “you can’t bluff your uncle Tecumseh Pickens! I’ll be your company in this graft. But I misdoubt if you’ve absorbed the inwardness of this Burdick Harris case, Calig; and if on any morning we get a telegram from the Secretary of State asking about the health of the scheme, I propose to acquire the most propinquitous and celeritous mule in this section and gallop diplomatically over into the neighboring and peaceful nation of Alabama.”</p>
 			</section>
 			<section id="hostages-to-momus-3" epub:type="chapter">
 				<h3 epub:type="z3998:roman">III</h3>
@@ -109,7 +109,7 @@
 				<p>While he is talking, two men crawl from under the bushes into camp, and Caligula, with no white flag to disinter him from his plain duty, draws his gun. But again Colonel Rockingham intervenes and introduces <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Jones and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Batts, engineer and fireman of train number forty-two.</p>
 				<p>“Excuse us,” says Batts, “but me and Jim have hunted squirrels all over this mounting, and we don’t need no white flag. Was that straight, colonel, about the plum pudding and pineapples and real store cigars?”</p>
 				<p>“Towel on a fishing-pole in the offing!” howls Caligula. “Suppose it’s the firing line of the freight conductors and brakeman.”</p>
-				<p>“My last trip down,” says I, wiping off my face. “If the S. &amp; E. T. wants to run an excursion up here just because we kidnapped their president, let ’em. We’ll put out our sign. ‘The Kidnapper’s Cafe and Trainmen’s Home.’ ”</p>
+				<p>“My last trip down,” says I, wiping off my face. “If the S. &amp; E. T. wants to run an excursion up here just because we kidnapped their president, let ’em. We’ll put out our sign. ‘The Kidnapper’s Café and Trainmen’s Home.’ ”</p>
 				<p>This time I caught Major Tallahassee Tucker by his own confession, and I felt easier. I asked him into the creek, so I could drown him if he happened to be a track-walker or caboose porter. All the way up the mountain he driveled to me about asparagus on toast, a thing that his intelligence in life had skipped.</p>
 				<p>Up above I got his mind segregated from food and asked if he had raised the ransom.</p>
 				<p>“My dear sir,” says he, “I succeeded in negotiating a loan on thirty thousand dollars’ worth of the bonds of our railroad, and⁠—”</p>
@@ -121,10 +121,10 @@
 				<p>“Gentlemen,” says he, “the stock of the Sunrise &amp; Edenville railroad has depreciated some. The best I could do with thirty thousand dollars’ worth of the bonds was to secure a loan of eighty-seven dollars and fifty cents. On the farming lands of Colonel Rockingham, Judge Pendergast was able to obtain, on a ninth mortgage, the sum of fifty dollars. You will find the amount, one hundred and thirty-seven fifty, correct.”</p>
 				<p>“A railroad president,” said I, looking this Tucker in the eye, “and the owner of a thousand acres of land; and yet⁠—”</p>
 				<p>“Gentlemen,” says Tucker, “The railroad is ten miles long. There don’t any train run on it except when the crew goes out in the pines and gathers enough lightwood knots to get up steam. A long time ago, when times was good, the net earnings used to run as high as eighteen dollars a week. Colonel Rockingham’s land has been sold for taxes thirteen times. There hasn’t been a peach crop in this part of Georgia for two years. The wet spring killed the watermelons. Nobody around here has money enough to buy fertilizer; and land is so poor the corn crop failed and there wasn’t enough grass to support the rabbits. All the people have had to eat in this section for over a year is hog and hominy, and⁠—”</p>
-				<p>“Pick,” interrupts Caligula, mussing up his red hair, “what are you going to do with that chicken-feed?”</p>
+				<p>“Pick,” interrupts Caligula, mussing up his red hair, “what are you going to do with that chickenfeed?”</p>
 				<p>I hands the money back to Major Tucker; and then I goes over to Colonel Rockingham and slaps him on the back.</p>
 				<p>“Colonel,” says I, “I hope you’ve enjoyed our little joke. We don’t want to carry it too far. Kidnappers! Well, wouldn’t it tickle your uncle? My name’s Rhinegelder, and I’m a nephew of Chauncey Depew. My friend’s a second cousin of the editor of <i epub:type="se:name.publication.magazine">Puck</i>. So you can see. We are down South enjoying ourselves in our humorous way. Now, there’s two quarts of cognac to open yet, and then the joke’s over.”</p>
-				<p>What’s the use to go into details? One or two will be enough. I remember Major Tallahassee Tucker playing on a jew’s-harp, and Caligula waltzing with his head on the watch pocket of a tall baggage-master. I hesitate to refer to the cake-walk done by me and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Patterson G. Coble with Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham between us.</p>
+				<p>What’s the use to go into details? One or two will be enough. I remember Major Tallahassee Tucker playing on a jew’sharp, and Caligula waltzing with his head on the watch pocket of a tall baggage-master. I hesitate to refer to the cakewalk done by me and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Patterson G. Coble with Colonel Jackson T. Rockingham between us.</p>
 				<p>And even on the next morning, when you wouldn’t think it possible, there was a consolation for me and Caligula. We knew that Raisuli himself never made half the hit with Burdick Harris that we did with the Sunrise &amp; Edenville Tap Railroad.</p>
 			</section>
 		</section>

src/epub/text/innocents-of-broadway.xhtml

@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
 			<p>“This New Yorker had made his money keeping a cigar store in Beekman street, and he hadn’t been above Fourteenth street in ten years. Moreover, he had whiskers, and the time had gone by when a true sport will do anything to a man with whiskers. No grafter except a boy who is soliciting subscribers to an illustrated weekly to win the prize air rifle, or a widow, would have the heart to tamper with the man behind with the razor. He was a typical city Reub⁠—I’d bet the man hadn’t been out of sight of a skyscraper in twenty-five years.</p>
 			<p>“Well, presently this metropolitan backwoodsman pulls out a roll of bills with an old blue sleeve elastic fitting tight around it and opens it up.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘There’s $5,000, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says he, shoving it over the table to me, ‘saved during my fifteen years of business. Put that in your pocket and keep it for me, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters. I’m glad to meet you gentlemen from the West, and I may take a drop too much. I want you to take care of my money for me. Now, let’s have another beer.’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘You’d better keep this yourself,’ says I. ‘We are strangers to you, and you can’t trust everybody you meet. Put your roll back in your pocket,’ says I. ‘And you’d better run along home before some farm-hand from the Kaw River bottoms strolls in here and sells you a copper mine.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘You’d better keep this yourself,’ says I. ‘We are strangers to you, and you can’t trust everybody you meet. Put your roll back in your pocket,’ says I. ‘And you’d better run along home before some farmhand from the Kaw River bottoms strolls in here and sells you a copper mine.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ says Whiskers. ‘I guess Little Old New York can take care of herself. I guess I know a man that’s on the square when I see him. I’ve always found the Western people all right. I ask you as a favor, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says he, ‘to keep that roll in your pocket for me. I know a gentleman when I see him. And now let’s have some more beer.’</p>
 			<p>“In about ten minutes this fall of manna leans back in his chair and snores. Andy looks at me and says: ‘I reckon I’d better stay with him for five minutes or so, in case the waiter comes in.’</p>
 			<p>“I went out the side door and walked half a block up the street. And then I came back and sat down at the table.</p>
@@ -30,17 +30,17 @@
 			<p>“Andy always took a pride in his poker playing. He got up from the table and looked sadly out of the window at the street cars.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Well, gentlemen,’ says the cigar man, ‘I don’t blame you for not wanting to play. I’ve forgotten the fine points of the game, I guess, it’s been so long since I indulged. Now, how long are you gentlemen going to be in the city?’</p>
 			<p>“I told him about a week longer. He says that’ll suit him fine. His cousin is coming over from Brooklyn that evening and they are going to see the sights of New York. His cousin, he says, is in the artificial limb and lead casket business, and hasn’t crossed the bridge in eight years. They expect to have the time of their lives, and he winds up by asking me to keep his roll of money for him till next day. I tried to make him take it, but it only insulted him to mention it.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘I’ll use what I’ve got in loose change,’ says he. ‘You keep the rest for me. I’ll drop in on you and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker to-morrow afternoon about 6 or 7,’ says he, ‘and we’ll have dinner together. Be good.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘I’ll use what I’ve got in loose change,’ says he. ‘You keep the rest for me. I’ll drop in on you and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker tomorrow afternoon about 6 or 7,’ says he, ‘and we’ll have dinner together. Be good.’</p>
 			<p>“After Whiskers had gone Andy looked at me curious and doubtful.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Well, Jeff,’ says he, ‘it looks like the ravens are trying to feed us two Elijahs so hard that if we turned ’em down again we ought to have the Audubon Society after us. It won’t do to put the crown aside too often. I know this is something like paternalism, but don’t you think Opportunity has skinned its knuckles about enough knocking at our door?’</p>
 			<p>“I put my feet up on the table and my hands in my pockets, which is an attitude unfavorable to frivolous thoughts.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Andy,’ says I, ‘this man with the hirsute whiskers has got us in a predicament. We can’t move hand or foot with his money. You and me have got a gentleman’s agreement with Fortune that we can’t break. We’ve done business in the West where it’s more of a fair game. Out there the people we skin are trying to skin us, even the farmers and the remittance men that the magazines send out to write up Goldfields. But there’s little sport in New York city for rod, reel or gun. They hunt here with either one of two things⁠—a slungshot or a letter of introduction. The town has been stocked so full of carp that the game fish are all gone. If you spread a net here, do you catch legitimate suckers in it, such as the Lord intended to be caught⁠—fresh guys who know it all, sports with a little coin and the nerve to play another man’s game, street crowds out for the fun of dropping a dollar or two and village smarties who know just where the little pea is? No, sir,’ says I. ‘What the grafters live on here is widows and orphans, and foreigners who save up a bag of money and hand it out over the first counter they see with an iron railing to it, and factory girls and little shopkeepers that never leave the block they do business on. That’s what they call suckers here. They’re nothing but canned sardines, and all the bait you need to catch ’em is a pocketknife and a soda cracker.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Now, this cigar man,’ I went on, ‘is one of the types. He’s lived twenty years on one street without learning as much as you would in getting a once-over shave from a lockjawed barber in a Kansas crossroads town. But he’s a New Yorker, and he’ll brag about that all the time when he isn’t picking up live wires or getting in front of street cars or paying out money to wire-tappers or standing under a safe that’s being hoisted into a skyscraper. When a New Yorker does loosen up,’ says I, ‘it’s like the spring decomposition of the ice jam in the Allegheny River. He’ll swamp you with cracked ice and back-water if you don’t get out of the way.</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Now, this cigar man,’ I went on, ‘is one of the types. He’s lived twenty years on one street without learning as much as you would in getting a once-over shave from a lockjawed barber in a Kansas crossroads town. But he’s a New Yorker, and he’ll brag about that all the time when he isn’t picking up live wires or getting in front of street cars or paying out money to wiretappers or standing under a safe that’s being hoisted into a skyscraper. When a New Yorker does loosen up,’ says I, ‘it’s like the spring decomposition of the ice jam in the Allegheny River. He’ll swamp you with cracked ice and backwater if you don’t get out of the way.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘It’s mighty lucky for us, Andy,’ says I, ‘that this cigar exponent with the parsley dressing saw fit to bedeck us with his childlike trust and altruism. For,’ says I, ‘this money of his is an eyesore to my sense of rectitude and ethics. We can’t take it, Andy; you know we can’t,’ says I, ‘for we haven’t a shadow of a title to it⁠—not a shadow. If there was the least bit of a way we could put in a claim to it I’d be willing to see him start in for another twenty years and make another $5,000 for himself, but we haven’t sold him anything, we haven’t been embroiled in a trade or anything commercial. He approached us friendly,’ says I, ‘and with blind and beautiful idiocy laid the stuff in our hands. We’ll have to give it back to him when he wants it.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Your arguments,’ says Andy, ‘are past criticism or comprehension. No, we can’t walk off with the money⁠—as things now stand. I admire your conscious way of doing business, Jeff,’ says Andy, ‘and I wouldn’t propose anything that wasn’t square in line with your theories of morality and initiative.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘But I’ll be away to-night and most of to-morrow Jeff,’ says Andy. ‘I’ve got some business affairs that I want to attend to. When this free greenbacks party comes in to-morrow afternoon hold him here till I arrive. We’ve all got an engagement for dinner, you know.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘But I’ll be away tonight and most of tomorrow Jeff,’ says Andy. ‘I’ve got some business affairs that I want to attend to. When this free greenbacks party comes in tomorrow afternoon hold him here till I arrive. We’ve all got an engagement for dinner, you know.’</p>
 			<p>“Well, sir, about 5 the next afternoon in trips the cigar man, with his eyes half open.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Been having a glorious time, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says he. ‘Took in all the sights. I tell you New York is the onliest only. Now if you don’t mind,’ says he, ‘I’ll lie down on that couch and doze off for about nine minutes before <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker comes. I’m not used to being up all night. And to-morrow, if you don’t mind, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters, I’ll take that five thousand. I met a man last night that’s got a sure winner at the racetrack to-morrow. Excuse me for being so impolite as to go to sleep, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Been having a glorious time, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says he. ‘Took in all the sights. I tell you New York is the onliest only. Now if you don’t mind,’ says he, ‘I’ll lie down on that couch and doze off for about nine minutes before <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker comes. I’m not used to being up all night. And tomorrow, if you don’t mind, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters, I’ll take that five thousand. I met a man last night that’s got a sure winner at the racetrack tomorrow. Excuse me for being so impolite as to go to sleep, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters.’</p>
 			<p>“And so this inhabitant of the second city in the world reposes himself and begins to snore, while I sit there musing over things and wishing I was back in the West, where you could always depend on a customer fighting to keep his money hard enough to let your conscience take it from him.</p>
 			<p>“At half-past 5 Andy comes in and sees the sleeping form.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I’ve been over to Trenton,’ says Andy, pulling a document out of his pocket. ‘I think I’ve got this matter fixed up all right, Jeff. Look at that.’</p>

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@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
 			<p>“I hired a wagon that night and commenced selling the bitters on Main Street. Fisher Hill was a low, malarial town; and a compound hypothetical pneumocardiac anti-scorbutic tonic was just what I diagnosed the crowd as needing. The bitters started off like sweetbreads-on-toast at a vegetarian dinner. I had sold two dozen at fifty cents apiece when I felt somebody pull my coat tail. I knew what that meant; so I climbed down and sneaked a five dollar bill into the hand of a man with a German silver star on his lapel.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Constable,’ says I, ‘it’s a fine night.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Have you got a city license,’ he asks, ‘to sell this illegitimate essence of spooju that you flatter by the name of medicine?’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘I have not,’ says I. ‘I didn’t know you had a city. If I can find it to-morrow I’ll take one out if it’s necessary.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘I have not,’ says I. ‘I didn’t know you had a city. If I can find it tomorrow I’ll take one out if it’s necessary.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I’ll have to close you up till you do,’ says the constable.</p>
 			<p>“I quit selling and went back to the hotel. I was talking to the landlord about it.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Oh, you won’t stand no show in Fisher Hill,’ says he. ‘<abbr>Dr.</abbr> Hoskins, the only doctor here, is a brother-in-law of the Mayor, and they won’t allow no fake doctor to practice in town.’</p>
@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@
 			<p>“I went to the Mayor’s office the next morning and they told me he hadn’t showed up yet. They didn’t know when he’d be down. So Doc Waugh-hoo hunches down again in a hotel chair and lights a jimpson-weed regalia, and waits.</p>
 			<p>“By and by a young man in a blue necktie slips into the chair next to me and asks the time.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Half-past ten,’ says I, ‘and you are Andy Tucker. I’ve seen you work. Wasn’t it you that put up the Great Cupid Combination package on the Southern States? Let’s see, it was a Chilian diamond engagement ring, a wedding ring, a potato masher, a bottle of soothing syrup and Dorothy Vernon⁠—all for fifty cents.’</p>
-			<p>“Andy was pleased to hear that I remembered him. He was a good street man; and he was more than that⁠—he respected his profession, and he was satisfied with 300 per cent. profit. He had plenty of offers to go into the illegitimate drug and garden seed business; but he was never to be tempted off of the straight path.</p>
+			<p>“Andy was pleased to hear that I remembered him. He was a good street man; and he was more than that⁠—he respected his profession, and he was satisfied with 300 percent profit. He had plenty of offers to go into the illegitimate drug and garden seed business; but he was never to be tempted off of the straight path.</p>
 			<p>“I wanted a partner, so Andy and me agreed to go out together. I told him about the situation in Fisher Hill and how finances was low on account of the local mixture of politics and jalap. Andy had just got in on the train that morning. He was pretty low himself, and was going to canvass the whole town for a few dollars to build a new battleship by popular subscription at Eureka Springs. So we went out and sat on the porch and talked it over.</p>
 			<p>“The next morning at eleven o’clock when I was sitting there alone, an Uncle Tom shuffles into the hotel and asked for the doctor to come and see Judge Banks, who, it seems, was the mayor and a mighty sick man.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I’m no doctor,’ says I. ‘Why don’t you go and get the doctor?’</p>
@@ -50,9 +50,9 @@
 			<p>“ ‘And what is that?’ says he.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Scientific demonstrations,’ says I. ‘The triumph of mind over sarsaparilla. The belief that there is no pain and sickness except what is produced when we ain’t feeling well. Declare yourself in arrears. Demonstrate.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘What is this paraphernalia you speak of, Doc?’ says the Mayor. ‘You ain’t a Socialist, are you?’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘I am speaking,’ says I, ‘of the great doctrine of psychic financiering⁠—of the enlightened school of long-distance, sub-conscientious treatment of fallacies and meningitis⁠—of that wonderful in-door sport known as personal magnetism.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘I am speaking,’ says I, ‘of the great doctrine of psychic financiering⁠—of the enlightened school of long-distance, sub-conscientious treatment of fallacies and meningitis⁠—of that wonderful indoor sport known as personal magnetism.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Can you work it, doc?’ asks the Mayor.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘I’m one of the Sole Sanhedrims and Ostensible Hooplas of the Inner Pulpit,’ says I. ‘The lame talk and the blind rubber whenever I make a pass at ’em. I am a medium, a coloratura hypnotist and a spirituous control. It was only through me at the recent seances at Ann Arbor that the late president of the Vinegar Bitters Company could revisit the earth to communicate with his sister Jane. You see me peddling medicine on the street,’ says I, ‘to the poor. I don’t practice personal magnetism on them. I do not drag it in the dust,’ says I, ‘because they haven’t got the dust.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘I’m one of the Sole Sanhedrims and Ostensible Hooplas of the Inner Pulpit,’ says I. ‘The lame talk and the blind rubber whenever I make a pass at ’em. I am a medium, a coloratura hypnotist and a spirituous control. It was only through me at the recent séances at Ann Arbor that the late president of the Vinegar Bitters Company could revisit the earth to communicate with his sister Jane. You see me peddling medicine on the street,’ says I, ‘to the poor. I don’t practice personal magnetism on them. I do not drag it in the dust,’ says I, ‘because they haven’t got the dust.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Will you treat my case?’ asks the Mayor.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Listen,’ says I. ‘I’ve had a good deal of trouble with medical societies everywhere I’ve been. I don’t practice medicine. But, to save your life, I’ll give you the psychic treatment if you’ll agree as mayor not to push the license question.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Of course I will,’ says he. ‘And now get to work, doc, for them pains are coming on again.’</p>
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@
 			<p>“The Mayor shut his eyes slowly and began to snore.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘You observe, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tiddle,’ says I, ‘the wonders of modern science.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Biddle,’ says he, ‘When will you give uncle the rest of the treatment, <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Pooh-pooh?’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Waugh-hoo,’ says I. ‘I’ll come back at eleven to-morrow. When he wakes up give him eight drops of turpentine and three pounds of steak. Good morning.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Waugh-hoo,’ says I. ‘I’ll come back at eleven tomorrow. When he wakes up give him eight drops of turpentine and three pounds of steak. Good morning.’</p>
 			<p>“The next morning I was back on time. ‘Well, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Riddle,’ says I, when he opened the bedroom door, ‘and how is uncle this morning?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘He seems much better,’ says the young man.</p>
 			<p>“The mayor’s color and pulse was fine. I gave him another treatment, and he said the last of the pain left him.</p>

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@@ -11,11 +11,11 @@
 			<p>Jeff Peters must be reminded. Whenever he is called upon, pointedly, for a story, he will maintain that his life has been as devoid of incident as the longest of Trollope’s novels. But lured, he will divulge. Therefore I cast many and divers flies upon the current of his thoughts before I feel a nibble.</p>
 			<p>“I notice,” said I, “that the Western farmers, in spite of their prosperity, are running after their old populistic idols again.”</p>
 			<p>“It’s the running season,” said Jeff, “for farmers, shad, maple trees and the Connemaugh river. I know something about farmers. I thought I struck one once that had got out of the rut; but Andy Tucker proved to me I was mistaken. ‘Once a farmer, always a sucker,’ said Andy. ‘He’s the man that’s shoved into the front row among bullets, ballots and the ballet. He’s the funny-bone and gristle of the country,’ said Andy, ‘and I don’t know who we would do without him.’</p>
-			<p>“One morning me and Andy wakes up with sixty-eight cents between us in a yellow pine hotel on the edge of the pre-digested hoe-cake belt of Southern Indiana. How we got off the train there the night before I can’t tell you; for she went through the village so fast that what looked like a saloon to us through the car window turned out to be a composite view of a drug store and a water tank two blocks apart. Why we got off at the first station we could, belongs to a little oroide gold watch and Alaska diamond deal we failed to pull off the day before, over the Kentucky line.</p>
+			<p>“One morning me and Andy wakes up with sixty-eight cents between us in a yellow pine hotel on the edge of the predigested hoecake belt of Southern Indiana. How we got off the train there the night before I can’t tell you; for she went through the village so fast that what looked like a saloon to us through the car window turned out to be a composite view of a drug store and a water tank two blocks apart. Why we got off at the first station we could, belongs to a little oroide gold watch and Alaska diamond deal we failed to pull off the day before, over the Kentucky line.</p>
 			<p>“When I woke up I heard roosters crowing, and smelt something like the fumes of nitro-muriatic acid, and heard something heavy fall on the floor below us, and a man swearing.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Cheer up, Andy,’ says I. ‘We’re in a rural community. Somebody has just tested a gold brick downstairs. We’ll go out and get what’s coming to us from a farmer; and then yoicks! and away.’</p>
 			<p>“Farmers was always a kind of reserve fund to me. Whenever I was in hard luck I’d go to the crossroads, hook a finger in a farmer’s suspender, recite the prospectus of my swindle in a mechanical kind of a way, look over what he had, give him back his keys, whetstone and papers that was of no value except to owner, and stroll away without asking any questions. Farmers are not fair game to me as high up in our business as me and Andy was; but there was times when we found ’em useful, just as Wall Street does the Secretary of the Treasury now and then.</p>
-			<p>“When we went down stairs we saw we was in the midst of the finest farming section we ever see. About two miles away on a hill was a big white house in a grove surrounded by a wide-spread agricultural agglomeration of fields and barns and pastures and out-houses.</p>
+			<p>“When we went down stairs we saw we was in the midst of the finest farming section we ever see. About two miles away on a hill was a big white house in a grove surrounded by a widespread agricultural agglomeration of fields and barns and pastures and outhouses.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Whose house is that?’ we asked the landlord.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘That,’ says he, ‘is the domicile and the arboreal, terrestrial and horticultural accessories of Farmer Ezra Plunkett, one of our county’s most progressive citizens.’</p>
 			<p>“After breakfast me and Andy, with eight cents capital left, casts the horoscope of the rural potentate.</p>
@@ -35,7 +35,7 @@
 			<p>“Just then a telephone bell rings in the house.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Come in, Bunk,’ says the farmer, ‘and look at my place. It’s kind of lonesome here sometimes. I think that’s New York calling.’</p>
 			<p>“We went inside. The room looked like a Broadway stockbroker’s⁠—light oak desks, two ‘phones, Spanish leather upholstered chairs and couches, oil paintings in gilt frames a foot deep and a ticker hitting off the news in one corner.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Hello, hello!’ says this funny farmer. ‘Is that the Regent Theatre? Yes; this is Plunkett, of Woodbine Centre. Reserve four orchestra seats for Friday evening⁠—my usual ones. Yes; Friday⁠—good-bye.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Hello, hello!’ says this funny farmer. ‘Is that the Regent Theatre? Yes; this is Plunkett, of Woodbine Centre. Reserve four orchestra seats for Friday evening⁠—my usual ones. Yes; Friday⁠—goodbye.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I run over to New York every two weeks to see a show,’ says the farmer, hanging up the receiver. ‘I catch the eighteen-hour flyer at Indianapolis, spend ten hours in the heyday of night on the Yappian Way, and get home in time to see the chickens go to roost forty-eight hours later. Oh, the pristine Hubbard squasherino of the cave-dwelling period is getting geared up some for the annual meeting of the Don’t-Blow-Out-the-Gas Association, don’t you think, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bunk?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I seem to perceive,’ says I, ‘a kind of hiatus in the agrarian traditions in which heretofore, I have reposed confidence.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Sure, Bunk,’ says he. ‘The yellow primrose on the river’s brim is getting to look to us Reubs like a holiday edition de luxe of the Language of Flowers with deckle edges and frontispiece.’</p>
@@ -43,7 +43,7 @@
 			<p>“ ‘Hello, hello!’ says he. ‘Oh, that’s Perkins, at Milldale. I told you $800 was too much for that horse. Have you got him there? Good. Let me see him. Get away from the transmitter. Now make him trot in a circle. Faster. Yes, I can hear him. Keep on⁠—faster yet. … That’ll do. Now lead him up to the phone. Closer. Get his nose nearer. There. Now wait. No; I don’t want that horse. What? No; not at any price. He interferes; and he’s windbroken. Goodbye.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Now, Bunk,’ says the farmer, ‘do you begin to realize that agriculture has had a hair cut? You belong in a bygone era. Why, Tom Lawson himself knows better than to try to catch an up-to-date agriculturalist napping. It’s Saturday, the Fourteenth, on the farm, you bet. Now, look here, and see how we keep up with the day’s doings.’</p>
 			<p>“He shows me a machine on a table with two things for your ears like the penny-in-the-slot affairs. I puts it on and listens. A female voice starts up reading headlines of murders, accidents and other political casualities.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘What you hear,’ says the farmer, ‘is a synopsis of to-day’s news in the New York, Chicago, <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis and San Francisco papers. It is wired in to our Rural News Bureau and served hot to subscribers. On this table you see the principal dailies and weeklies of the country. Also a special service of advance sheets of the monthly magazines.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘What you hear,’ says the farmer, ‘is a synopsis of today’s news in the New York, Chicago, <abbr>St.</abbr> Louis and San Francisco papers. It is wired in to our Rural News Bureau and served hot to subscribers. On this table you see the principal dailies and weeklies of the country. Also a special service of advance sheets of the monthly magazines.’</p>
 			<p>“I picks up one sheet and sees that it’s headed: ‘Special Advance Proofs. In July, 1909, the <i epub:type="se:name.publication.newspaper">Century</i> will say’⁠—and so forth.</p>
 			<p>“The farmer rings up somebody⁠—his manager, I reckon⁠—and tells him to let that herd of 15 Jerseys go at $600 a head; and to sow the 900-acre field in wheat; and to have 200 extra cans ready at the station for the milk trolley car. Then he passes the Henry Clays and sets out a bottle of green chartreuse, and goes over and looks at the ticker tape.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Consolidated Gas up two points,’ says he. ‘Oh, very well.’</p>
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@
 			<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ says he, finally, ‘I believe your story of this expurgated rustic; but I am not convinced. It looks incredulous to me that he could have inoculated himself against all the preordained systems of bucolic bunco. Now, you never regarded me as a man of special religious proclivities, did you, Jeff?’ says Andy.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘No. But,’ says I, not to wound his feelings, ‘I have also observed many church members whose said proclivities were not so outwardly developed that they would show on a white handkerchief if you rubbed ’em with it.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I have always been a deep student of nature from creation down,’ says Andy, ‘and I believe in an ultimatum design of Providence. Farmers was made for a purpose; and that was to furnish a livelihood to men like me and you. Else why was we given brains? It is my belief that the manna that the Israelites lived on for forty years in the wilderness was only a figurative word for farmers; and they kept up the practice to this day. And now,’ says Andy, ‘I am going to test my theory “Once a farmer, always a come-on,” in spite of the veneering and the orifices that a spurious civilization has brought to him.’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘You’ll fail, same as I did,’ says I. ‘This one’s shook off the shackles of the sheep-fold. He’s entrenched behind the advantages of electricity, education, literature and intelligence.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘You’ll fail, same as I did,’ says I. ‘This one’s shook off the shackles of the sheepfold. He’s entrenched behind the advantages of electricity, education, literature and intelligence.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I’ll try,’ said Andy. ‘There are certain Laws of Nature that Free Rural Delivery can’t overcome.’</p>
 			<p>“Andy fumbles around awhile in the closet and comes out dressed in a suit with brown and yellow checks as big as your hand. His vest is red with blue dots, and he wears a high silk hat. I noticed he’d soaked his sandy mustache in a kind of blue ink.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Great Barnums?’ says I. ‘You’re a ringer for a circus thimblerig man.’</p>

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@@ -45,7 +45,7 @@
 			<p>“ ‘ “Bring ’em along,” he’ll say, of course, “if they care to invest.” Now, how does that scheme strike you?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘What do you say, Jeff?’ says Andy, looking at me.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Why, I’ll tell you what I say,’ says I. ‘I say let’s settle this thing right here now. I don’t see any use of wasting any more time.’ I took a nickel-plated .38 out of my pocket and clicked the cylinder around a few times.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘You undevout, sinful, insidious hog,’ says I to Murkison, ‘get out that two thousand and lay it on the table. Obey with velocity,’ says I, ‘for otherwise alternatives are impending. I am preferably a man of mildness, but now and then I find myself in the middle of extremities. Such men as you,’ I went on after he had laid the money out, ‘is what keeps the jails and court houses going. You come up here to rob these men of their money. Does it excuse you?’ I asks, ‘that they were trying to skin you? No, sir; you was going to rob Peter to stand off Paul. You are ten times worse,’ says I, ‘than that green goods man. You go to church at home and pretend to be a decent citizen, but you’ll come to Chicago and commit larceny from men that have built up a sound and profitable business by dealing with such contemptible scoundrels as you have tried to be to-day. How do you know,’ says I, ‘that that green goods man hasn’t a large family dependent upon his extortions? It’s you supposedly respectable citizens who are always on the lookout to get something for nothing,’ says I, ‘that support the lotteries and wild-cat mines and stock exchanges and wire tappers of this country. If it wasn’t for you they’d go out of business. The green goods man you was going to rob,’ says I, ‘studied maybe for years to learn his trade. Every turn he makes he risks his money and liberty and maybe his life. You come up here all sanctified and vanoplied with respectability and a pleasing post office address to swindle him. If he gets the money you can squeal to the police. If you get it he hocks the gray suit to buy supper and says nothing. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker and me sized you up,’ says I, ‘and came along to see that you got what you deserved. Hand over the money,’ says I, ‘you grass fed hypocrite.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘You undevout, sinful, insidious hog,’ says I to Murkison, ‘get out that two thousand and lay it on the table. Obey with velocity,’ says I, ‘for otherwise alternatives are impending. I am preferably a man of mildness, but now and then I find myself in the middle of extremities. Such men as you,’ I went on after he had laid the money out, ‘is what keeps the jails and court houses going. You come up here to rob these men of their money. Does it excuse you?’ I asks, ‘that they were trying to skin you? No, sir; you was going to rob Peter to stand off Paul. You are ten times worse,’ says I, ‘than that green goods man. You go to church at home and pretend to be a decent citizen, but you’ll come to Chicago and commit larceny from men that have built up a sound and profitable business by dealing with such contemptible scoundrels as you have tried to be today. How do you know,’ says I, ‘that that green goods man hasn’t a large family dependent upon his extortions? It’s you supposedly respectable citizens who are always on the lookout to get something for nothing,’ says I, ‘that support the lotteries and wildcat mines and stock exchanges and wire tappers of this country. If it wasn’t for you they’d go out of business. The green goods man you was going to rob,’ says I, ‘studied maybe for years to learn his trade. Every turn he makes he risks his money and liberty and maybe his life. You come up here all sanctified and vanoplied with respectability and a pleasing post office address to swindle him. If he gets the money you can squeal to the police. If you get it he hocks the gray suit to buy supper and says nothing. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker and me sized you up,’ says I, ‘and came along to see that you got what you deserved. Hand over the money,’ says I, ‘you grass fed hypocrite.’</p>
 			<p>“I put the two thousand, which was all in $20 bills, in my inside pocket.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Now get out your watch,’ says I to Murkison. ‘No, I don’t want it,’ says I. ‘Lay it on the table and you sit in that chair till it ticks off an hour. Then you can go. If you make any noise or leave any sooner we’ll handbill you all over Grassdale. I guess your high position there is worth more than $2,000 to you.’</p>
 			<p>“Then me and Andy left.</p>
@@ -54,7 +54,7 @@
 			<p>“ ‘Was that the idea you had,’ says he, ‘when we started out with Murkison?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Why, certainly,’ says I. ‘What else could it have been? Wasn’t it yours, too?’</p>
 			<p>“In about half an hour Andy spoke again. I think there are times when Andy don’t exactly understand my system of ethics and moral hygiene.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ says he, ‘some time when you have the leisure I wish you’d draw off a diagram and foot-notes of that conscience of yours. I’d like to have it to refer to occasionally.’ ”</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ says he, ‘some time when you have the leisure I wish you’d draw off a diagram and footnotes of that conscience of yours. I’d like to have it to refer to occasionally.’ ”</p>
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@@ -29,11 +29,11 @@
 			<p>“The next day in walking around Floresville we see on a hill a big red brick building that appears to be disinhabited. The citizens speak up and tell us that it was begun for a residence several years before by a mine owner. After running up the house he finds he only had $2.80 left to furnish it with, so he invests that in whiskey and jumps off the roof on a spot where he now requiescats in pieces.</p>
 			<p>“As soon as me and Andy saw that building the same idea struck both of us. We would fix it up with lights and pen wipers and professors, and put an iron dog and statues of Hercules and Father John on the lawn, and start one of the finest free educational institutions in the world right there.</p>
 			<p>“So we talks it over to the prominent citizens of Floresville, who falls in fine with the idea. They give a banquet in the engine house to us, and we make our bow for the first time as benefactors to the cause of progress and enlightenment. Andy makes an hour-and-a-half speech on the subject of irrigation in Lower Egypt, and we have a moral tune on the phonograph and pineapple sherbet.</p>
-			<p>“Andy and me didn’t lose any time in philanthropping. We put every man in town that could tell a hammer from a step ladder to work on the building, dividing it up into class rooms and lecture halls. We wire to Frisco for a car load of desks, footballs, arithmetics, penholders, dictionaries, chairs for the professors, slates, skeletons, sponges, twenty-seven cravenetted gowns and caps for the senior class, and an open order for all the truck that goes with a first-class university. I took it on myself to put a campus and a curriculum on the list; but the telegraph operator must have got the words wrong, being an ignorant man, for when the goods come we found a can of peas and a curry-comb among ’em.</p>
+			<p>“Andy and me didn’t lose any time in philanthropping. We put every man in town that could tell a hammer from a step ladder to work on the building, dividing it up into class rooms and lecture halls. We wire to Frisco for a car load of desks, footballs, arithmetics, penholders, dictionaries, chairs for the professors, slates, skeletons, sponges, twenty-seven cravenetted gowns and caps for the senior class, and an open order for all the truck that goes with a first-class university. I took it on myself to put a campus and a curriculum on the list; but the telegraph operator must have got the words wrong, being an ignorant man, for when the goods come we found a can of peas and a currycomb among ’em.</p>
 			<p>“While the weekly papers was having chalk-plate cuts of me and Andy we wired an employment agency in Chicago to express us f.o.b., six professors immediately⁠—one English literature, one up-to-date dead languages, one chemistry, one political economy⁠—democrat preferred⁠—one logic, and one wise to painting, Italian and music, with union card. The Esperanza bank guaranteed salaries, which was to run between $800 and $800.50.</p>
-			<p>“Well, sir, we finally got in shape. Over the front door was carved the words: ‘The World’s University; Peters &amp; Tucker, Patrons and Proprietors. And when September the first got a cross-mark on the calendar, the come-ons begun to roll in. First the faculty got off the tri-weekly express from Tucson. They was mostly young, spectacled, and red-headed, with sentiments divided between ambition and food. Andy and me got ’em billeted on the Floresvillians and then laid for the students.</p>
+			<p>“Well, sir, we finally got in shape. Over the front door was carved the words: ‘The World’s University; Peters &amp; Tucker, Patrons and Proprietors. And when September the first got a cross-mark on the calendar, the come-ons begun to roll in. First the faculty got off the tri-weekly express from Tucson. They was mostly young, spectacled, and redheaded, with sentiments divided between ambition and food. Andy and me got ’em billeted on the Floresvillians and then laid for the students.</p>
 			<p>“They came in bunches. We had advertised the University in all the state papers, and it did us good to see how quick the country responded. Two hundred and nineteen husky lads aging along from 18 up to chin whiskers answered the clarion call of free education. They ripped open that town, sponged the seams, turned it, lined it with new mohair; and you couldn’t have told it from Harvard or Goldfields at the March term of court.</p>
-			<p>“They marched up and down the streets waving flags with the World’s University colors⁠—ultra-marine and blue⁠—and they certainly made a lively place of Floresville. Andy made them a speech from the balcony of the Skyview Hotel, and the whole town was out celebrating.</p>
+			<p>“They marched up and down the streets waving flags with the World’s University colors⁠—ultramarine and blue⁠—and they certainly made a lively place of Floresville. Andy made them a speech from the balcony of the Skyview Hotel, and the whole town was out celebrating.</p>
 			<p>“In about two weeks the professors got the students disarmed and herded into classes. I don’t believe there’s any pleasure equal to being a philanthropist. Me and Andy bought high silk hats and pretended to dodge the two reporters of the Floresville Gazette. The paper had a man to kodak us whenever we appeared on the street, and ran our pictures every week over the column headed ‘Educational Notes.’ Andy lectured twice a week at the University; and afterward I would rise and tell a humorous story. Once the Gazette printed my pictures with Abe Lincoln on one side and Marshall P. Wilder on the other.</p>
 			<p>“Andy was as interested in philanthropy as I was. We used to wake up of nights and tell each other new ideas for booming the University.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Andy,’ says I to him one day, ‘there’s something we overlooked. The boys ought to have dromedaries.’</p>
@@ -55,7 +55,7 @@
 			<p>“ ‘Wait a while,’ says Andy, ‘and see how things turn out. We have taken up too noble a cause to draw out now. Besides, the further I gaze into the retail philanthropy business the better it looks to me. I never thought about investigating it before. Come to think of it now,’ goes on Andy, ‘all the philanthropists I ever knew had plenty of money. I ought to have looked into that matter long ago, and located which was the cause and which was the effect.’</p>
 			<p>“I had confidence in Andy’s chicanery in financial affairs, so I left the whole thing in his hands. The University was flourishing fine, and me and Andy kept our silk hats shined up, and Floresville kept on heaping honors on us like we was millionaires instead of almost busted philanthropists.</p>
 			<p>“The students kept the town lively and prosperous. Some stranger came to town and started a faro bank over the Red Front livery stable, and began to amass money in quantities. Me and Andy strolled up one night and piked a dollar or two for sociability. There were about fifty of our students there drinking rum punches and shoving high stacks of blues and reds about the table as the dealer turned the cards up.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Why, dang it, Andy,’ says I, ‘these free-school-hunting, gander-headed, silk-socked little sons of sap-suckers have got more money than you and me ever had. Look at the rolls they’re pulling out of their pistol pockets?’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Why, dang it, Andy,’ says I, ‘these free-school-hunting, gander-headed, silk-socked little sons of sapsuckers have got more money than you and me ever had. Look at the rolls they’re pulling out of their pistol pockets?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Yes,’ says Andy, ‘a good many of them are sons of wealthy miners and stockmen. It’s very sad to see ’em wasting their opportunities this way.’</p>
 			<p>“At Christmas all the students went home to spend the holidays. We had a farewell blowout at the University, and Andy lectured on ‘Modern Music and Prehistoric Literature of the Archipelagos.’ Each one of the faculty answered to toasts, and compared me and Andy to Rockefeller and the Emperor Marcus Autolycus. I pounded on the table and yelled for Professor McCorkle; but it seems he wasn’t present on the occasion. I wanted a look at the man that Andy thought could earn $100 a week in philanthropy that was on the point of making an assignment.</p>
 			<p>“The students all left on the night train; and the town sounded as quiet as the campus of a correspondence school at midnight. When I went to the hotel I saw a light in Andy’s room, and I opened the door and walked in.</p>

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@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
 	<body epub:type="bodymatter z3998:fiction">
 		<section id="the-ethics-of-pig" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
 			<h2 epub:type="title">The Ethics of Pig</h2>
-			<p>On an east-bound train I went into the smoker and found Jefferson Peters, the only man with a brain west of the Wabash River who can use his cerebrum, cerebellum, and medulla oblongata at the same time.</p>
+			<p>On an eastbound train I went into the smoker and found Jefferson Peters, the only man with a brain west of the Wabash River who can use his cerebrum, cerebellum, and medulla oblongata at the same time.</p>
 			<p>Jeff is in the line of unillegal graft. He is not to be dreaded by widows and orphans; he is a reducer of surplusage. His favorite disguise is that of the target-bird at which the spendthrift or the reckless investor may shy a few inconsequential dollars. He is readily vocalized by tobacco; so, with the aid of two thick and easy-burning brevas, I got the story of his latest Autolycan adventure.</p>
 			<p>“In my line of business,” said Jeff, “the hardest thing is to find an upright, trustworthy, strictly honorable partner to work a graft with. Some of the best men I ever worked with in a swindle would resort to trickery at times.</p>
 			<p>“So, last summer, I thinks I will go over into this section of country where I hear the serpent has not yet entered, and see if I can find a partner naturally gifted with a talent for crime, but not yet contaminated by success.</p>
@@ -31,30 +31,30 @@
 			<p>“ ‘Shucks, now,’ says I, in the mountain idiom, ‘don’t tell me there’s a man in Mount Nebo as bad as that.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Worse,’ says the storekeeper. ‘He steals hogs.’</p>
 			<p>“I think I will look up this <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tatum; so a day or two after the constable turned him out I got acquainted with him and invited him out on the edge of town to sit on a log and talk business.</p>
-			<p>“What I wanted was a partner with a natural rural make-up to play a part in some little one-act outrages that I was going to book with the Pitfall &amp; Gin circuit in some of the Western towns; and this R. Tatum was born for the role as sure as nature cast Fairbanks for the stuff that kept Eliza from sinking into the river.</p>
-			<p>“He was about the size of a first baseman; and he had ambiguous blue eyes like the china dog on the mantelpiece that Aunt Harriet used to play with when she was a child. His hair waved a little bit like the statue of the dinkus-thrower at the Vacation in Rome, but the color of it reminded you of the ‘Sunset in the Grand Canon, by an American Artist,’ that they hang over the stove-pipe holes in the salongs. He was the Reub, without needing a touch. You’d have known him for one, even if you’d seen him on the vaudeville stage with one cotton suspender and a straw over his ear.</p>
+			<p>“What I wanted was a partner with a natural rural makeup to play a part in some little one-act outrages that I was going to book with the Pitfall &amp; Gin circuit in some of the Western towns; and this R. Tatum was born for the role as sure as nature cast Fairbanks for the stuff that kept Eliza from sinking into the river.</p>
+			<p>“He was about the size of a first baseman; and he had ambiguous blue eyes like the china dog on the mantelpiece that Aunt Harriet used to play with when she was a child. His hair waved a little bit like the statue of the dinkus-thrower at the Vacation in Rome, but the color of it reminded you of the ‘Sunset in the Grand Canon, by an American Artist,’ that they hang over the stovepipe holes in the salongs. He was the Reub, without needing a touch. You’d have known him for one, even if you’d seen him on the vaudeville stage with one cotton suspender and a straw over his ear.</p>
 			<p>“I told him what I wanted, and found him ready to jump at the job.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Overlooking such a trivial little peccadillo as the habit of manslaughter,’ says I, ‘what have you accomplished in the way of indirect brigandage or nonactionable thriftiness that you could point to, with or without pride, as an evidence of your qualifications for the position?’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Why,’ says he, in his kind of Southern system of procrastinated accents, ‘hain’t you heard tell? There ain’t any man, black or white, in the Blue Ridge that can tote off a shoat as easy as I can without bein’ heard, seen, or cotched. I can lift a shoat,’ he goes on, ‘out of a pen, from under a porch, at the trough, in the woods, day or night, anywhere or anyhow, and I guarantee nobody won’t hear a squeal. It’s all in the way you grab hold of ’em and carry ’em atterwards. Some day,’ goes on this gentle despoiler of pig-pens, ‘I hope to become reckernized as the champion shoat-stealer of the world.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Why,’ says he, in his kind of Southern system of procrastinated accents, ‘hain’t you heard tell? There ain’t any man, black or white, in the Blue Ridge that can tote off a shoat as easy as I can without bein’ heard, seen, or cotched. I can lift a shoat,’ he goes on, ‘out of a pen, from under a porch, at the trough, in the woods, day or night, anywhere or anyhow, and I guarantee nobody won’t hear a squeal. It’s all in the way you grab hold of ’em and carry ’em atterwards. Some day,’ goes on this gentle despoiler of pigpens, ‘I hope to become reckernized as the champion shoat-stealer of the world.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘It’s proper to be ambitious,’ says I; ‘and hog-stealing will do very well for Mount Nebo; but in the outside world, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tatum, it would be considered as crude a piece of business as a bear raid on Bay State Gas. However, it will do as a guarantee of good faith. We’ll go into partnership. I’ve got a thousand dollars cash capital; and with that homeward-plods atmosphere of yours we ought to be able to win out a few shares of Soon Parted, preferred, in the money market.’</p>
 			<p>“So I attaches Rufe, and we go away from Mount Nebo down into the lowlands. And all the way I coach him for his part in the grafts I had in mind. I had idled away two months on the Florida coast, and was feeling all to the Ponce de Leon, besides having so many new schemes up my sleeve that I had to wear kimonos to hold ’em.</p>
-			<p>“I intended to assume a funnel shape and mow a path nine miles wide though the farming belt of the Middle West; so we headed in that direction. But when we got as far as Lexington we found Binkley Brothers’ circus there, and the blue-grass peasantry romping into town and pounding the Belgian blocks with their hand-pegged sabots as artless and arbitrary as an extra session of a Datto Bryan drama. I never pass a circus without pulling the valve-cord and coming down for a little Key West money; so I engaged a couple of rooms and board for Rufe and me at a house near the circus grounds run by a widow lady named Peevy. Then I took Rufe to a clothing store and gent’s-outfitted him. He showed up strong, as I knew he would, after he was rigged up in the ready-made rutabaga regalia. Me and old Misfitzky stuffed him into a bright blue suit with a Nile green visible plaid effect, and riveted on a fancy vest of a light Tuskegee Normal tan color, a red necktie, and the yellowest pair of shoes in town.</p>
-			<p>“They were the first clothes Rufe had ever worn except the gingham layette and the butternut top-dressing of his native kraal, and he looked as self-conscious as an Igorrote with a new nose-ring.</p>
+			<p>“I intended to assume a funnel shape and mow a path nine miles wide though the farming belt of the Middle West; so we headed in that direction. But when we got as far as Lexington we found Binkley Brothers’ circus there, and the bluegrass peasantry romping into town and pounding the Belgian blocks with their hand-pegged sabots as artless and arbitrary as an extra session of a Datto Bryan drama. I never pass a circus without pulling the valve-cord and coming down for a little Key West money; so I engaged a couple of rooms and board for Rufe and me at a house near the circus grounds run by a widow lady named Peevy. Then I took Rufe to a clothing store and gent’s-outfitted him. He showed up strong, as I knew he would, after he was rigged up in the ready-made rutabaga regalia. Me and old Misfitzky stuffed him into a bright blue suit with a Nile green visible plaid effect, and riveted on a fancy vest of a light Tuskegee Normal tan color, a red necktie, and the yellowest pair of shoes in town.</p>
+			<p>“They were the first clothes Rufe had ever worn except the gingham layette and the butternut topdressing of his native kraal, and he looked as self-conscious as an Igorrote with a new nose-ring.</p>
 			<p>“That night I went down to the circus tents and opened a small shell game. Rufe was to be the capper. I gave him a roll of phony currency to bet with and kept a bunch of it in a special pocket to pay his winnings out of. No; I didn’t mistrust him; but I simply can’t manipulate the ball to lose when I see real money bet. My fingers go on a strike every time I try it.</p>
-			<p>“I set up my little table and began to show them how easy it was to guess which shell the little pea was under. The unlettered hinds gathered in a thick semicircle and began to nudge elbows and banter one another to bet. Then was when Rufe ought to have single-footed up and called the turn on the little joker for a few tens and fives to get them started. But, no Rufe. I’d seen him two or three times walking about and looking at the side-show pictures with his mouth full of peanut candy; but he never came nigh.</p>
+			<p>“I set up my little table and began to show them how easy it was to guess which shell the little pea was under. The unlettered hinds gathered in a thick semicircle and began to nudge elbows and banter one another to bet. Then was when Rufe ought to have single-footed up and called the turn on the little joker for a few tens and fives to get them started. But, no Rufe. I’d seen him two or three times walking about and looking at the sideshow pictures with his mouth full of peanut candy; but he never came nigh.</p>
 			<p>“The crowd piked a little; but trying to work the shells without a capper is like fishing without a bait. I closed the game with only forty-two dollars of the unearned increment, while I had been counting on yanking the yeomen for two hundred at least. I went home at eleven and went to bed. I supposed that the circus had proved too alluring for Rufe, and that he had succumbed to it, concert and all; but I meant to give him a lecture on general business principles in the morning.</p>
 			<p>“Just after Morpheus had got both my shoulders to the shuck mattress I hears a houseful of unbecoming and ribald noises like a youngster screeching with green-apple colic. I opens my door and calls out in the hall for the widow lady, and when she sticks her head out, I says: ‘<abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peevy, ma’am, would you mind choking off that kid of yours so that honest people can get their rest?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Sir,’ says she, ‘it’s no child of mine. It’s the pig squealing that your friend <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tatum brought home to his room a couple of hours ago. And if you are uncle or second cousin or brother to it, I’d appreciate your stopping its mouth, sir, yourself, if you please.’</p>
 			<p>“I put on some of the polite outside habiliments of external society and went into Rufe’s room. He had gotten up and lit his lamp, and was pouring some milk into a tin pan on the floor for a dingy-white, half-grown, squealing pig.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘How is this, Rufe?’ says I. ‘You flimflammed in your part of the work to-night and put the game on crutches. And how do you explain the pig? It looks like back-sliding to me.’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Now, don’t be too hard on me, Jeff,’ says he. ‘You know how long I’ve been used to stealing shoats. It’s got to be a habit with me. And to-night, when I see such a fine chance, I couldn’t help takin’ it.’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘maybe you’ve really got kleptopigia. And maybe when we get out of the pig belt you’ll turn your mind to higher and more remunerative misconduct. Why you should want to stain your soul with such a distasteful, feeble-minded, perverted, roaring beast as that I can’t understand.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘How is this, Rufe?’ says I. ‘You flimflammed in your part of the work tonight and put the game on crutches. And how do you explain the pig? It looks like backsliding to me.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Now, don’t be too hard on me, Jeff,’ says he. ‘You know how long I’ve been used to stealing shoats. It’s got to be a habit with me. And tonight, when I see such a fine chance, I couldn’t help takin’ it.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘maybe you’ve really got kleptopigia. And maybe when we get out of the pig belt you’ll turn your mind to higher and more remunerative misconduct. Why you should want to stain your soul with such a distasteful, feebleminded, perverted, roaring beast as that I can’t understand.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Why, Jeff,’ says he, ‘you ain’t in sympathy with shoats. You don’t understand ’em like I do. This here seems to me to be an animal of more than common powers of ration and intelligence. He walked half across the room on his hind legs a while ago.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Well, I’m going back to bed,’ says I. ‘See if you can impress it upon your friend’s ideas of intelligence that he’s not to make so much noise.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘He was hungry,’ says Rufe. ‘He’ll go to sleep and keep quiet now.’</p>
 			<p>“I always get up before breakfast and read the morning paper whenever I happen to be within the radius of a Hoe cylinder or a Washington hand-press. The next morning I got up early, and found a Lexington daily on the front porch where the carrier had thrown it. The first thing I saw in it was a double-column ad. on the front page that read like this:</p>
 			<blockquote>
-				<p>The above amount will be paid, and no questions asked, for the return, alive and uninjured, of Beppo, the famous European educated pig, that strayed or was stolen from the side-show tents of Binkley Bros.’ circus last night.</p>
+				<p>The above amount will be paid, and no questions asked, for the return, alive and uninjured, of Beppo, the famous European educated pig, that strayed or was stolen from the sideshow tents of Binkley Bros.’ circus last night.</p>
 				<footer>
 					<p class="signature">Geo. B. Tapley, Business Manager.</p>
 					<p>At the circus grounds.</p>
@@ -82,22 +82,22 @@
 			<p>“ ‘I’ll just take him into my own room,’ says I, ‘and lock him up till after breakfast.’</p>
 			<p>“I took the pig by the hind leg. He turned on a squeal like the steam calliope at the circus.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Let me tote him in for you,’ says Rufe; and he picks up the beast under one arm, holding his snout with the other hand, and packs him into my room like a sleeping baby.</p>
-			<p>“After breakfast Rufe, who had a chronic case of haberdashery ever since I got his trousseau, says he believes he will amble down to Misfitzky’s and look over some royal-purple socks. And then I got as busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wall-paper. I found an old Negro man with an express wagon to hire; and we tied the pig in a sack and drove down to the circus grounds.</p>
-			<p>“I found George B. Tapley in a little tent with a window flap open. He was a fattish man with an immediate eye, in a black skull-cap, with a four-ounce diamond screwed into the bosom of his red sweater.</p>
+			<p>“After breakfast Rufe, who had a chronic case of haberdashery ever since I got his trousseau, says he believes he will amble down to Misfitzky’s and look over some royal-purple socks. And then I got as busy as a one-armed man with the nettle-rash pasting on wallpaper. I found an old Negro man with an express wagon to hire; and we tied the pig in a sack and drove down to the circus grounds.</p>
+			<p>“I found George B. Tapley in a little tent with a window flap open. He was a fattish man with an immediate eye, in a black skullcap, with a four-ounce diamond screwed into the bosom of his red sweater.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Are you George B. Tapley?’ I asks.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I swear it,’ says he.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Well, I’ve got it,’ says I.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Designate,’ says he. ‘Are you the guinea pigs for the Asiatic python or the alfalfa for the sacred buffalo?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Neither,’ says I. ‘I’ve got Beppo, the educated hog, in a sack in that wagon. I found him rooting up the flowers in my front yard this morning. I’ll take the five thousand dollars in large bills, if it’s handy.’</p>
-			<p>“George B. hustles out of his tent, and asks me to follow. We went into one of the side-shows. In there was a jet black pig with a pink ribbon around his neck lying on some hay and eating carrots that a man was feeding to him.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Hey, Mac,’ calls G. B. ‘Nothing wrong with the world-wide this morning, is there?’</p>
+			<p>“George B. hustles out of his tent, and asks me to follow. We went into one of the sideshows. In there was a jet black pig with a pink ribbon around his neck lying on some hay and eating carrots that a man was feeding to him.</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Hey, Mac,’ calls G. B. ‘Nothing wrong with the worldwide this morning, is there?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Him? No,’ says the man. ‘He’s got an appetite like a chorus girl at 1 <abbr class="time">a.m.</abbr>’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘How’d you get this pipe?’ says Tapley to me. ‘Eating too many pork chops last night?’</p>
 			<p>“I pulls out the paper and shows him the ad.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Fake,’ says he. ‘Don’t know anything about it. You’ve beheld with your own eyes the marvelous, world-wide porcine wonder of the four-footed kingdom eating with preternatural sagacity his matutinal meal, unstrayed and unstole. Good morning.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Fake,’ says he. ‘Don’t know anything about it. You’ve beheld with your own eyes the marvelous, worldwide porcine wonder of the four-footed kingdom eating with preternatural sagacity his matutinal meal, unstrayed and unstole. Good morning.’</p>
 			<p>“I was beginning to see. I got in the wagon and told Uncle Ned to drive to the most adjacent orifice of the nearest alley. There I took out my pig, got the range carefully for the other opening, set his sights, and gave him such a kick that he went out the other end of the alley twenty feet ahead of his squeal.</p>
 			<p>“Then I paid Uncle Ned his fifty cents, and walked down to the newspaper office. I wanted to hear it in cold syllables. I got the advertising man to his window.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘To decide a bet,’ says I, ‘wasn’t the man who had this ad. put in last night short and fat, with long black whiskers and a club-foot?’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘To decide a bet,’ says I, ‘wasn’t the man who had this ad. put in last night short and fat, with long black whiskers and a clubfoot?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘He was not,’ says the man. ‘He would measure about six feet by four and a half inches, with corn-silk hair, and dressed like the pansies of the conservatory.’</p>
 			<p>“At dinner time I went back to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Peevy’s.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Shall I keep some soup hot for <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tatum till he comes back?’ she asks.</p>

src/epub/text/the-exact-science-of-matrimony.xhtml

@@ -42,10 +42,10 @@
 			<p>“About one hundred a day was what came in. I never knew there was so many large hearted but indigent men in the country who were willing to acquire a charming widow and assume the burden of investing her money.</p>
 			<p>“Most of them admitted that they ran principally to whiskers and lost jobs and were misunderstood by the world, but all of ’em were sure that they were so chock full of affection and manly qualities that the widow would be making the bargain of her life to get ’em.</p>
 			<p>“Every applicant got a reply from Peters &amp; Tucker informing him that the widow had been deeply impressed by his straightforward and interesting letter and requesting them to write again; stating more particulars; and enclosing photograph if convenient. Peters &amp; Tucker also informed the applicant that their fee for handing over the second letter to their fair client would be $2, enclosed therewith.</p>
-			<p>“There you see the simple beauty of the scheme. About 90 per cent. of them domestic foreign noblemen raised the price somehow and sent it in. That was all there was to it. Except that me and Andy complained an amount about being put to the trouble of slicing open them envelopes, and taking the money out.</p>
+			<p>“There you see the simple beauty of the scheme. About 90 percent of them domestic foreign noblemen raised the price somehow and sent it in. That was all there was to it. Except that me and Andy complained an amount about being put to the trouble of slicing open them envelopes, and taking the money out.</p>
 			<p>“Some few clients called in person. We sent ’em to <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter and she did the rest; except for three or four who came back to strike us for carfare. After the letters began to get in from the r.f.d. districts Andy and me were taking in about $200 a day.</p>
 			<p>“One afternoon when we were busiest and I was stuffing the two and ones into cigar boxes and Andy was whistling ‘No Wedding Bells for Her’ a small slick man drops in and runs his eye over the walls like he was on the trail of a lost Gainesborough painting or two. As soon as I saw him I felt a glow of pride, because we were running our business on the level.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘I see you have quite a large mail to-day,’ says the man.</p>
+			<p>“ ‘I see you have quite a large mail today,’ says the man.</p>
 			<p>“I reached and got my hat.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Come on,’ says I. ‘We’ve been expecting you. I’ll show you the goods. How was Teddy when you left Washington?’</p>
 			<p>“I took him down to the Riverview Hotel and had him shake hands with <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Trotter. Then I showed him her bank book with the $2,000 to her credit.</p>

src/epub/text/the-hand-that-riles-the-world.xhtml

@@ -9,15 +9,15 @@
 		<section id="the-hand-that-riles-the-world" epub:type="volume se:short-story">
 			<h2 epub:type="title">The Hand That Riles the World</h2>
 			<p>“Many of our great men,” said I (apropos of many things), “have declared that they owe their success to the aid and encouragement of some brilliant woman.”</p>
-			<p>“I know,” said Jeff Peters. “I’ve read in history and mythology about Joan of Arc and <abbr>Mme.</abbr> Yale and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Caudle and Eve and other noted females of the past. But, in my opinion, the woman of to-day is of little use in politics or business. What’s she best in, anyway?⁠—men make the best cooks, milliners, nurses, housekeepers, stenographers, clerks, hairdressers and launderers. About the only job left that a woman can beat a man in is female impersonator in vaudeville.”</p>
+			<p>“I know,” said Jeff Peters. “I’ve read in history and mythology about Joan of Arc and <abbr>Mme.</abbr> Yale and <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Caudle and Eve and other noted females of the past. But, in my opinion, the woman of today is of little use in politics or business. What’s she best in, anyway?⁠—men make the best cooks, milliners, nurses, housekeepers, stenographers, clerks, hairdressers and launderers. About the only job left that a woman can beat a man in is female impersonator in vaudeville.”</p>
 			<p>“I would have thought,” said I, “that occasionally, anyhow, you would have found the wit and intuition of woman valuable to you in your lines of⁠—er⁠—business.”</p>
 			<p>“Now, wouldn’t you,” said Jeff, with an emphatic nod⁠—“wouldn’t you have imagined that? But a woman is an absolutely unreliable partner in any straight swindle. She’s liable to turn honest on you when you are depending upon her the most. I tried ’em once.</p>
 			<p>“Bill Humble, an old friend of mine in the Territories, conceived the illusion that he wanted to be appointed United States Marshall. At that time me and Andy was doing a square, legitimate business of selling walking canes. If you unscrewed the head of one and turned it up to your mouth a half pint of good rye whiskey would go trickling down your throat to reward you for your act of intelligence. The deputies was annoying me and Andy some, and when Bill spoke to me about his officious aspirations, I saw how the appointment as Marshall might help along the firm of Peters &amp; Tucker.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Jeff,’ says Bill to me, ‘you are a man of learning and education, besides having knowledge and information concerning not only rudiments but facts and attainments.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I do,’ says I, ‘and I have never regretted it. I am not one,’ says I, ‘who would cheapen education by making it free. Tell me,’ says I, ‘which is of the most value to mankind, literature or horse racing?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Why⁠—er⁠—, playing the po⁠—I mean, of course, the poets and the great writers have got the call, of course,’ says Bill.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Exactly,’ says I. ‘Then why do the master minds of finance and philanthropy,’ says I, ‘charge us $2 to get into a race-track and let us into a library free? Is that distilling into the masses,’ says I, ‘a correct estimate of the relative value of the two means of self-culture and disorder?’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘You are arguing outside of my faculties of sense and rhetoric,’ says Bill. ‘What I wanted you to do is to go to Washington and dig out this appointment for me. I haven’t no ideas of cultivation and intrigue. I’m a plain citizen and I need the job. I’ve killed seven men,’ says Bill; ‘I’ve got nine children; I’ve been a good Republican ever since the first of May; I can’t read nor write, and I see no reason why I ain’t illegible for the office. And I think your partner, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker,’ goes on Bill, ‘is also a man of sufficient ingratiation and connected system of mental delinquency to assist you in securing the appointment. I will give you preliminary,’ says Bill, ‘$1,000 for drinks, bribes and carfare in Washington. If you land the job I will pay you $1,000 more, cash down, and guarantee you impunity in boot-legging whiskey for twelve months. Are you patriotic to the West enough to help me put this thing through the Whitewashed Wigwam of the Great Father of the most eastern flag station of the Pennsylvania Railroad?’ says Bill.</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Exactly,’ says I. ‘Then why do the master minds of finance and philanthropy,’ says I, ‘charge us $2 to get into a racetrack and let us into a library free? Is that distilling into the masses,’ says I, ‘a correct estimate of the relative value of the two means of self-culture and disorder?’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘You are arguing outside of my faculties of sense and rhetoric,’ says Bill. ‘What I wanted you to do is to go to Washington and dig out this appointment for me. I haven’t no ideas of cultivation and intrigue. I’m a plain citizen and I need the job. I’ve killed seven men,’ says Bill; ‘I’ve got nine children; I’ve been a good Republican ever since the first of May; I can’t read nor write, and I see no reason why I ain’t illegible for the office. And I think your partner, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Tucker,’ goes on Bill, ‘is also a man of sufficient ingratiation and connected system of mental delinquency to assist you in securing the appointment. I will give you preliminary,’ says Bill, ‘$1,000 for drinks, bribes and carfare in Washington. If you land the job I will pay you $1,000 more, cash down, and guarantee you impunity in bootlegging whiskey for twelve months. Are you patriotic to the West enough to help me put this thing through the Whitewashed Wigwam of the Great Father of the most eastern flag station of the Pennsylvania Railroad?’ says Bill.</p>
 			<p>“Well, I talked to Andy about it, and he liked the idea immense. Andy was a man of an involved nature. He was never content to plod along, as I was, selling to the peasantry some little tool like a combination steak beater, shoe horn, marcel waver, monkey wrench, nail file, potato masher and Multum in Parvo tuning fork. Andy had the artistic temper, which is not to be judged as a preacher’s or a moral man’s is by purely commercial deflections. So we accepted Bill’s offer, and strikes out for Washington.</p>
 			<p>“Says I to Andy, when we get located at a hotel on South Dakota Avenue, G.S.S.W. ‘Now Andy, for the first time in our lives we’ve got to do a real dishonest act. Lobbying is something we’ve never been used to; but we’ve got to scandalize ourselves for Bill Humble’s sake. In a straight and legitimate business,’ says I, ‘we could afford to introduce a little foul play and chicanery, but in a disorderly and heinous piece of malpractice like this it seems to me that the straightforward and aboveboard way is the best. I propose,’ says I, ‘that we hand over $500 of this money to the chairman of the national campaign committee, get a receipt, lay the receipt on the President’s desk and tell him about Bill. The President is a man who would appreciate a candidate who went about getting office that way instead of pulling wires.’</p>
 			<p>“Andy agreed with me, but after we talked the scheme over with the hotel clerk we give that plan up. He told us that there was only one way to get an appointment in Washington, and that was through a lady lobbyist. He gave us the address of one he recommended, a <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Avery, who he said was high up in sociable and diplomatic rings and circles.</p>
@@ -26,8 +26,8 @@
 			<p>“She had on a low necked dress covered with silver spangles, and diamond rings and ear bobs. Her arms was bare; and she was using a desk telephone with one hand, and drinking tea with the other.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Well, boys,’ says she after a bit, ‘what is it?’</p>
 			<p>“I told her in as few words as possible what we wanted for Bill, and the price we could pay.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Those western appointments,’ says she, ‘are easy. Le’me see, now,’ says she, ‘who could put that through for us. No use fooling with the Territorial delegates. I guess,’ says she, ‘that Senator Sniper would be about the man. He’s from somewheres in the West. Let’s see how he stands on my private menu card.’ She takes some papers out of a pigeon-hole with the letter ‘S’ over it.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘he’s marked with a star; that means “ready to serve.” Now, let’s see. “Age 55; married twice; Presbyterian, likes blondes, Tolstoi, poker and stewed terrapin; sentimental at third bottle of wine.” Yes,’ she goes on, ‘I am sure I can have your friend, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bummer, appointed Minister to Brazil.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Those western appointments,’ says she, ‘are easy. Le’me see, now,’ says she, ‘who could put that through for us. No use fooling with the Territorial delegates. I guess,’ says she, ‘that Senator Sniper would be about the man. He’s from somewheres in the West. Let’s see how he stands on my private menu card.’ She takes some papers out of a pigeonhole with the letter ‘S’ over it.</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘he’s marked with a star; that means “ready to serve.” Now, let’s see. “Age 55; married twice; Presbyterian, likes blondes, Tolstoy, poker and stewed terrapin; sentimental at third bottle of wine.” Yes,’ she goes on, ‘I am sure I can have your friend, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bummer, appointed Minister to Brazil.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Humble,’ says I. ‘And United States Marshal was the berth.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Oh, yes,’ says <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> Avery. ‘I have so many deals of this sort I sometimes get them confused. Give me all the memoranda you have of the case, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters, and come back in four days. I think it can be arranged by then.’</p>
 			<p>“So me and Andy goes back to our hotel and waits. Andy walks up and down and chews the left end of his mustache.</p>

src/epub/text/the-man-higher-up.xhtml

@@ -16,9 +16,9 @@
 			<p>“Well, burglary ought to be wiped out, too,” said Jeff; and I wondered whether the laugh had been redundant.</p>
 			<p>“About three months ago,” said Jeff, “it was my privilege to become familiar with a sample of each of the aforesaid branches of illegitimate art. I was <i xml:lang="la">sine qua grata</i> with a member of the housebreakers’ union and one of the John D. Napoleons of finance at the same time.”</p>
 			<p>“Interesting combination,” said I, with a yawn. “Did I tell you I bagged a duck and a ground-squirrel at one shot last week over in the Ramapos?” I knew well how to draw Jeff’s stories.</p>
-			<p>“Let me tell you first about these barnacles that clog the wheels of society by poisoning the springs of rectitude with their upas-like eye,” said Jeff, with the pure gleam of the muck-raker in his own.</p>
+			<p>“Let me tell you first about these barnacles that clog the wheels of society by poisoning the springs of rectitude with their upas-like eye,” said Jeff, with the pure gleam of the muckraker in his own.</p>
 			<p>“As I said, three months ago I got into bad company. There are two times in a man’s life when he does this⁠—when he’s dead broke, and when he’s rich.</p>
-			<p>“Now and then the most legitimate business runs out of luck. It was out in Arkansas I made the wrong turn at a cross-road, and drives into this town of Peavine by mistake. It seems I had already assaulted and disfigured Peavine the spring of the year before. I had sold $600 worth of young fruit trees there⁠—plums, cherries, peaches and pears. The Peaviners were keeping an eye on the country road and hoping I might pass that way again. I drove down Main street as far as the Crystal Palace drugstore before I realized I had committed ambush upon myself and my white horse Bill.</p>
+			<p>“Now and then the most legitimate business runs out of luck. It was out in Arkansas I made the wrong turn at a crossroad, and drives into this town of Peavine by mistake. It seems I had already assaulted and disfigured Peavine the spring of the year before. I had sold $600 worth of young fruit trees there⁠—plums, cherries, peaches and pears. The Peaviners were keeping an eye on the country road and hoping I might pass that way again. I drove down Main street as far as the Crystal Palace drugstore before I realized I had committed ambush upon myself and my white horse Bill.</p>
 			<p>“The Peaviners took me by surprise and Bill by the bridle and began a conversation that wasn’t entirely disassociated with the subject of fruit trees. A committee of ’em ran some trace-chains through the armholes of my vest, and escorted me through their gardens and orchards.</p>
 			<p>“Their fruit trees hadn’t lived up to their labels. Most of ’em had turned out to be persimmons and dogwoods, with a grove or two of blackjacks and poplars. The only one that showed any signs of bearing anything was a fine young cottonwood that had put forth a hornet’s nest and half of an old corset-cover.</p>
 			<p>“The Peaviners protracted our fruitless stroll to the edge of town. They took my watch and money on account; and they kept Bill and the wagon as hostages. They said the first time one of them dogwood trees put forth an Amsden’s June peach I might come back and get my things. Then they took off the trace chains and jerked their thumbs in the direction of the Rocky Mountains; and I struck a Lewis and Clark lope for the swollen rivers and impenetrable forests.</p>
@@ -31,9 +31,9 @@
 			<p>“He stoops over to brush the dust off his clothes, when out of his pocket drops a fine, nine-inch burglar’s steel jimmy. He picks it up and looks at me sharp, and then grins and holds out his hand.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Brother,’ says he, ‘greetings. Didn’t I see you in Southern Missouri last summer selling colored sand at half-a-dollar a teaspoonful to put into lamps to keep the oil from exploding?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Oil,’ says I, ‘never explodes. It’s the gas that forms that explodes.’ But I shakes hands with him, anyway.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘My name’s Bill Bassett,’ says he to me, ‘and if you’ll call it professional pride instead of conceit, I’ll inform you that you have the pleasure of meeting the best burglar that ever set a gum-shoe on ground drained by the Mississippi River.’</p>
-			<p>“Well, me and this Bill Bassett sits on the ties and exchanges brags as artists in kindred lines will do. It seems he didn’t have a cent, either, and we went into close caucus. He explained why an able burglar sometimes had to travel on freights by telling me that a servant girl had played him false in Little Rock, and he was making a quick get-away.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘It’s part of my business,’ says Bill Bassett, ‘to play up to the ruffles when I want to make a riffle as Raffles. ’Tis loves that makes the bit go ’round. Show me a house with a swag in it and a pretty parlor-maid, and you might as well call the silver melted down and sold, and me spilling truffles and that Chateau stuff on the napkin under my chin, while the police are calling it an inside job just because the old lady’s nephew teaches a Bible class. I first make an impression on the girl,’ says Bill, ‘and when she lets me inside I make an impression on the locks. But this one in Little Rock done me,’ says he. ‘She saw me taking a trolley ride with another girl, and when I came ’round on the night she was to leave the door open for me it was fast. And I had keys made for the doors upstairs. But, no sir. She had sure cut off my locks. She was a Delilah,’ says Bill Bassett.</p>
+			<p>“ ‘My name’s Bill Bassett,’ says he to me, ‘and if you’ll call it professional pride instead of conceit, I’ll inform you that you have the pleasure of meeting the best burglar that ever set a gumshoe on ground drained by the Mississippi River.’</p>
+			<p>“Well, me and this Bill Bassett sits on the ties and exchanges brags as artists in kindred lines will do. It seems he didn’t have a cent, either, and we went into close caucus. He explained why an able burglar sometimes had to travel on freights by telling me that a servant girl had played him false in Little Rock, and he was making a quick getaway.</p>
+			<p>“ ‘It’s part of my business,’ says Bill Bassett, ‘to play up to the ruffles when I want to make a riffle as Raffles. ’Tis loves that makes the bit go ’round. Show me a house with a swag in it and a pretty parlormaid, and you might as well call the silver melted down and sold, and me spilling truffles and that Château stuff on the napkin under my chin, while the police are calling it an inside job just because the old lady’s nephew teaches a Bible class. I first make an impression on the girl,’ says Bill, ‘and when she lets me inside I make an impression on the locks. But this one in Little Rock done me,’ says he. ‘She saw me taking a trolley ride with another girl, and when I came ’round on the night she was to leave the door open for me it was fast. And I had keys made for the doors upstairs. But, no sir. She had sure cut off my locks. She was a Delilah,’ says Bill Bassett.</p>
 			<p>“It seems that Bill tried to break in anyhow with his jimmy, but the girl emitted a succession of bravura noises like the top-riders of a tally-ho, and Bill had to take all the hurdles between there and the depot. As he had no baggage they tried hard to check his departure, but he made a train that was just pulling out.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Well,’ says Bill Bassett, when we had exchanged memories of our dead lives, ‘I could eat. This town don’t look like it was kept under a Yale lock. Suppose we commit some mild atrocity that will bring in temporary expense money. I don’t suppose you’ve brought along any hair tonic or rolled gold watch-chains, or similar law-defying swindles that you could sell on the plaza to the pikers of the paretic populace, have you?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘No,’ says I, ‘I left an elegant line of Patagonian diamond earrings and rainy-day sunbursts in my valise at Peavine. But they’re to stay there until some of those black-gum trees begin to glut the market with yellow clings and Japanese plums. I reckon we can’t count on them unless we take Luther Burbank in for a partner.’</p>
@@ -42,11 +42,11 @@
 			<p>“ ‘Come on,’ says Bill Bassett to me, starting after him.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Where?’ I asks.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Lordy!’ says Bill, ‘had you forgot you was in the desert? Didn’t you see Colonel Manna drop down right before your eyes? Don’t you hear the rustling of General Raven’s wings? I’m surprised at you, Elijah.’</p>
-			<p>“We overtook the stranger in the edge of some woods, and, as it was after sun-down and in a quiet place, nobody saw us stop him. Bill takes the silk hat off the man’s head and brushes it with his sleeve and puts it back.</p>
+			<p>“We overtook the stranger in the edge of some woods, and, as it was after sundown and in a quiet place, nobody saw us stop him. Bill takes the silk hat off the man’s head and brushes it with his sleeve and puts it back.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘What does this mean, sir?’ says the man.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘When I wore one of these,’ says Bill, ‘and felt embarrassed, I always done that. Not having one now I had to use yours. I hardly know how to begin, sir, in explaining our business with you, but I guess we’ll try your pockets first.’</p>
 			<p>“Bill Bassett felt in all of them, and looked disgusted.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Not even a watch,’ he says. ‘Ain’t you ashamed of yourself, you whited sculpture? Going about dressed like a head-waiter, and financed like a Count! You haven’t even got carfare. What did you do with your transfer?’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Not even a watch,’ he says. ‘Ain’t you ashamed of yourself, you whited sculpture? Going about dressed like a headwaiter, and financed like a Count! You haven’t even got carfare. What did you do with your transfer?’</p>
 			<p>“The man speaks up and says he has no assets or valuables of any sort. But Bassett takes his hand-satchel and opens it. Out comes some collars and socks and a half a page of a newspaper clipped out. Bill reads the clipping careful, and holds out his hand to the held-up party.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Brother,’ says he, ‘greetings! Accept the apologies of friends. I am Bill Bassett, the burglar. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters, you must make the acquaintance of <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Alfred E. Ricks. Shake hands. <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters,’ says Bill, ‘stands about halfway between me and you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ricks, in the line of havoc and corruption. He always gives something for the money he gets. I’m glad to meet you, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Ricks⁠—you and <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters. This is the first time I ever attended a full gathering of the National Synod of Sharks⁠—housebreaking, swindling, and financiering all represented. Please examine <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Rick’s credentials, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters.’</p>
 			<p>“The piece of newspaper that Bill Bassett handed me had a good picture of this Ricks on it. It was a Chicago paper, and it had obloquies of Ricks in every paragraph. By reading it over I harvested the intelligence that said alleged Ricks had laid off all that portion of the State of Florida that lies under water into town lots and sold ’em to alleged innocent investors from his magnificently furnished offices in Chicago. After he had taken in a hundred thousand or so dollars one of these fussy purchasers that are always making trouble (I’ve had ’em actually try gold watches I’ve sold ’em with acid) took a cheap excursion down to the land where it is always just before supper to look at his lot and see if it didn’t need a new paling or two on the fence, and market a few lemons in time for the Christmas present trade. He hires a surveyor to find his lot for him. They run the line out and find the flourishing town of Paradise Hollow, so advertised, to be about 40 rods and 16 poles S., 27 degrees E. of the middle of Lake Okeechobee. This man’s lot was under thirty-six feet of water, and, besides, had been preempted so long by the alligators and gars that his title looked fishy.</p>
@@ -59,14 +59,14 @@
 			<p>“ ‘Sometimes,’ says he, with his mouth full of country produce, ‘I lose all patience with you people that think you are higher up in the profession than I am. Now, what could either of you have done in the present emergency to set us on our feet again? Could you do it, Ricksy?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I must confess, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bassett,’ says Ricks, speaking nearly inaudible out of a slice of pie, ‘that at this immediate juncture I could not, perhaps, promote an enterprise to relieve the situation. Large operations, such as I direct, naturally require careful preparation in advance. I⁠—’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I know, Ricksy,’ breaks in Bill Bassett. ‘You needn’t finish. You need $500 to make the first payment on a blond typewriter, and four roomsful of quartered oak furniture. And you need $500 more for advertising contracts. And you need two weeks’ time for the fish to begin to bite. Your line of relief would be about as useful in an emergency as advocating municipal ownership to cure a man suffocated by eighty-cent gas. And your graft ain’t much swifter, Brother Peters,’ he winds up.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘I haven’t seen you turn anything into gold with your wand yet, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Good Fairy. ‘Most anybody could rub the magic ring for a little left-over victuals.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Oh,’ says I, ‘I haven’t seen you turn anything into gold with your wand yet, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Good Fairy. ‘Most anybody could rub the magic ring for a little leftover victuals.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘That was only getting the pumpkin ready,’ says Bassett, braggy and cheerful. ‘The coach and six’ll drive up to the door before you know it, Miss Cinderella. Maybe you’ve got some scheme under your sleeve-holders that will give us a start.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Son,’ says I, ‘I’m fifteen years older than you are, and young enough yet to take out an endowment policy. I’ve been broke before. We can see the lights of that town not half a mile away. I learned under Montague Silver, the greatest street man that ever spoke from a wagon. There are hundreds of men walking those streets this moment with grease spots on their clothes. Give me a gasoline lamp, a dry-goods box, and a two-dollar bar of white castile soap, cut into little⁠—’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Where’s your two dollars?’ snickered Bill Bassett into my discourse. There was no use arguing with that burglar.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘No,’ he goes on; ‘you’re both babes-in-the-wood. Finance has closed the mahogany desk, and trade has put the shutters up. Both of you look to labor to start the wheels going. All right. You admit it. To-night I’ll show you what Bill Bassett can do.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘No,’ he goes on; ‘you’re both babes-in-the-wood. Finance has closed the mahogany desk, and trade has put the shutters up. Both of you look to labor to start the wheels going. All right. You admit it. Tonight I’ll show you what Bill Bassett can do.’</p>
 			<p>“Bassett tells me and Ricks not to leave the cabin till he comes back, even if it’s daylight, and then he starts off toward town, whistling gay.</p>
 			<p>“This Alfred E. Ricks pulls off his shoes and his coat, lays a silk handkerchief over his hat, and lays down on the floor.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘I think I will endeavor to secure a little slumber,’ he squeaks. ‘The day has been fatiguing. Good-night, my dear <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘I think I will endeavor to secure a little slumber,’ he squeaks. ‘The day has been fatiguing. Good night, my dear <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Peters.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘My regards to Morpheus,’ says I. ‘I think I’ll sit up a while.’</p>
 			<p>“About two o’clock, as near as I could guess by my watch in Peavine, home comes our laboring man and kicks up Ricks, and calls us to the streak of bright moonlight shining in the cabin door. Then he spreads out five packages of one thousand dollars each on the floor, and begins to cackle over the nest-egg like a hen.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I’ll tell you a few things about that town,’ says he. ‘It’s named Rocky Springs, and they’re building a Masonic temple, and it looks like the Democratic candidate for mayor is going to get soaked by a Pop, and Judge Tucker’s wife, who has been down with pleurisy, is getting some better. I had a talk on these liliputian thesises before I could get a siphon in the fountain of knowledge that I was after. And there’s a bank there called the Lumberman’s Fidelity and Plowman’s Savings Institution. It closed for business yesterday with $23,000 cash on hand. It will open this morning with $18,000⁠—all silver⁠—that’s the reason I didn’t bring more. There you are, trade and capital. Now, will you be bad?’</p>
@@ -82,15 +82,15 @@
 			<p>“ ‘My dear young friend,’ says he, ‘I will never forget your generosity. Heaven will reward you. But let me implore you to turn from your ways of violence and crime.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Mousie,’ says Bill, ‘the hole in the wainscoting for yours. Your dogmas and inculcations sound to me like the last words of a bicycle pump. What has your high moral, elevator-service system of pillage brought you to? Penuriousness and want. Even Brother Peters, who insists upon contaminating the art of robbery with theories of commerce and trade, admitted he was on the lift. Both of you live by the gilded rule. Brother Peters,’ says Bill, ‘you’d better choose a slice of this embalmed currency. You’re welcome.’</p>
 			<p>“I told Bill Bassett once more to put his money in his pocket. I never had the respect for burglary that some people have. I always gave something for the money I took, even if it was only some little trifle for a souvenir to remind ’em not to get caught again.</p>
-			<p>“And then Alfred E. Ricks grovels at Bill’s feet again, and bids us adieu. He says he will have a team at a farmhouse, and drive to the station below, and take the train for Denver. It salubrified the atmosphere when that lamentable boll-worm took his departure. He was a disgrace to every non-industrial profession in the country. With all his big schemes and fine offices he had wound up unable even to get an honest meal except by the kindness of a strange and maybe unscrupulous burglar. I was glad to see him go, though I felt a little sorry for him, now that he was ruined forever. What could such a man do without a big capital to work with? Why, Alfred E. Ricks, as we left him, was as helpless as turtle on its back. He couldn’t have worked a scheme to beat a little girl out of a penny slate-pencil.</p>
+			<p>“And then Alfred E. Ricks grovels at Bill’s feet again, and bids us adieu. He says he will have a team at a farmhouse, and drive to the station below, and take the train for Denver. It salubrified the atmosphere when that lamentable bollworm took his departure. He was a disgrace to every nonindustrial profession in the country. With all his big schemes and fine offices he had wound up unable even to get an honest meal except by the kindness of a strange and maybe unscrupulous burglar. I was glad to see him go, though I felt a little sorry for him, now that he was ruined forever. What could such a man do without a big capital to work with? Why, Alfred E. Ricks, as we left him, was as helpless as turtle on its back. He couldn’t have worked a scheme to beat a little girl out of a penny slate-pencil.</p>
 			<p>“When me and Bill Bassett was left alone I did a little sleight-of-mind turn in my head with a trade secret at the end of it. Thinks I, I’ll show this <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Burglar Man the difference between business and labor. He had hurt some of my professional self-adulation by casting his Persians upon commerce and trade.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘I won’t take any of your money as a gift, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bassett,’ says I to him, ‘but if you’ll pay my expenses as a travelling companion until we get out of the danger zone of the immoral deficit you have caused in this town’s finances to-night, I’ll be obliged.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘I won’t take any of your money as a gift, <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bassett,’ says I to him, ‘but if you’ll pay my expenses as a travelling companion until we get out of the danger zone of the immoral deficit you have caused in this town’s finances tonight, I’ll be obliged.’</p>
 			<p>“Bill Bassett agreed to that, and we hiked westward as soon as we could catch a safe train.</p>
 			<p>“When we got to a town in Arizona called Los Perros I suggested that we once more try our luck on terra-cotta. That was the home of Montague Silver, my old instructor, now retired from business. I knew Monty would stake me to web money if I could show him a fly buzzing ’round the locality. Bill Bassett said all towns looked alike to him as he worked mainly in the dark. So we got off the train in Los Perros, a fine little town in the silver region.</p>
 			<p>“I had an elegant little sure thing in the way of a commercial slungshot that I intended to hit Bassett behind the ear with. I wasn’t going to take his money while he was asleep, but I was going to leave him with a lottery ticket that would represent in experience to him $4,755⁠—I think that was the amount he had when we got off the train. But the first time I hinted to him about an investment, he turns on me and disencumbers himself of the following terms and expressions.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Brother Peters,’ says he, ‘it ain’t a bad idea to go into an enterprise of some kind, as you suggest. I think I will. But if I do it will be such a cold proposition that nobody but Robert E. Peary and Charlie Fairbanks will be able to sit on the board of directors.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I thought you might want to turn your money over,’ says I.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘I do,’ says he, ‘frequently. I can’t sleep on one side all night. I’ll tell you, Brother Peters,’ says he, ‘I’m going to start a poker room. I don’t seem to care for the humdrum in swindling, such as peddling egg-beaters and working off breakfast food on Barnum and Bailey for sawdust to strew in their circus rings. But the gambling business,’ says he, ‘from the profitable side of the table is a good compromise between swiping silver spoons and selling penwipers at a Waldorf-Astoria charity bazar.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘I do,’ says he, ‘frequently. I can’t sleep on one side all night. I’ll tell you, Brother Peters,’ says he, ‘I’m going to start a poker room. I don’t seem to care for the humdrum in swindling, such as peddling eggbeaters and working off breakfast food on Barnum and Bailey for sawdust to strew in their circus rings. But the gambling business,’ says he, ‘from the profitable side of the table is a good compromise between swiping silver spoons and selling penwipers at a Waldorf-Astoria charity bazar.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Then,’ says I, ‘<abbr>Mr.</abbr> Bassett, you don’t care to talk over my little business proposition?’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Why,’ says he, ‘do you know, you can’t get a Pasteur institute to start up within fifty miles of where I live. I bite so seldom.’</p>
 			<p>“So, Bassett rents a room over a saloon and looks around for some furniture and chromos. The same night I went to Monty Silver’s house, and he let me have $200 on my prospects. Then I went to the only store in Los Perros that sold playing cards and bought every deck in the house. The next morning when the store opened I was there bringing all the cards back with me. I said that my partner that was going to back me in the game had changed his mind; and I wanted to sell the cards back again. The storekeeper took ’em at half price.</p>
@@ -101,9 +101,9 @@
 			<p>“Well, Jeff,” said I, when the Autolycan adventurer seemed to have divulged the gist of his tale, “I hope you took care of the money. That would be a respecta⁠—that is a considerable working capital if you should choose some day to settle down to some sort of regular business.”</p>
 			<p>“Me?” said Jeff, virtuously. “You can bet I’ve taken care of that five thousand.”</p>
 			<p>He tapped his coat over the region of his chest exultantly.</p>
-			<p>“Gold mining stock,” he explained, “every cent of it. Shares par value one dollar. Bound to go up 500 per cent. within a year. Non-assessable. The Blue Gopher mine. Just discovered a month ago. Better get in yourself if you’ve any spare dollars on hand.”</p>
+			<p>“Gold mining stock,” he explained, “every cent of it. Shares par value one dollar. Bound to go up 500 percent within a year. Non-assessable. The Blue Gopher mine. Just discovered a month ago. Better get in yourself if you’ve any spare dollars on hand.”</p>
 			<p>“Sometimes,” said I, “these mines are not⁠—”</p>
-			<p>“Oh, this one’s solid as an old goose,” said Jeff. “Fifty thousand dollars’ worth of ore in sight, and 10 per cent. monthly earnings guaranteed.”</p>
+			<p>“Oh, this one’s solid as an old goose,” said Jeff. “Fifty thousand dollars’ worth of ore in sight, and 10 percent monthly earnings guaranteed.”</p>
 			<p>He drew out a long envelope from his pocket and cast it on the table.</p>
 			<p>“Always carry it with me,” said he. “So the burglar can’t corrupt or the capitalist break in and water it.”</p>
 			<p>I looked at the beautifully engraved certificate of stock.</p>

src/epub/text/the-octopus-marooned.xhtml

@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@
 			<p>“Bird City hopped out of its nest, waggled its pin feathers and strolled out for its matutinal toot. Lo! Mexican Joe’s place was closed and likewise the other little ‘dobe life saving station. So, naturally the body politic emits thirsty ejaculations of surprise and ports hellum for the Blue Snake. And what does it find there?</p>
 			<p>“Behind one end of the bar sits Jefferson Peters, octopus, with a sixshooter on each side of him, ready to make change or corpses as the case may be. There are three bartenders; and on the wall is a ten foot sign reading: ‘All Drinks One Dollar.’ Andy sits on the safe in his neat blue suit and gold-banded cigar, on the lookout for emergencies. The town marshal is there with two deputies to keep order, having been promised free drinks by the trust.</p>
 			<p>“Well, sir, it took Bird City just ten minutes to realize that it was in a cage. We expected trouble; but there wasn’t any. The citizens saw that we had ’em. The nearest railroad was thirty miles away; and it would be two weeks at least before the river would be fordable. So they began to cuss, amiable, and throw down dollars on the bar till it sounded like a selection on the xylophone.</p>
-			<p>“There was about 1,500 grown-up adults in Bird City that had arrived at years of indiscretion; and the majority of ’em required from three to twenty drinks a day to make life endurable. The Blue Snake was the only place where they could get ’em till the flood subsided. It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.</p>
+			<p>“There was about 1,500 grownup adults in Bird City that had arrived at years of indiscretion; and the majority of ’em required from three to twenty drinks a day to make life endurable. The Blue Snake was the only place where they could get ’em till the flood subsided. It was beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.</p>
 			<p>“About ten o’clock the silver dollars dropping on the bar slowed down to playing two-steps and marches instead of jigs. But I looked out the window and saw a hundred or two of our customers standing in line at Bird City Savings and Loan <abbr>Co.</abbr>, and I knew they were borrowing more money to be sucked in by the clammy tendrils of the octopus.</p>
 			<p>“At the fashionable hour of noon everybody went home to dinner. We told the bartenders to take advantage of the lull, and do the same. Then me and Andy counted the receipts. We had taken in $1,300. We calculated that if Bird City would only remain an island for two weeks the trust would be able to endow the Chicago University with a new dormitory of padded cells for the faculty, and present every worthy poor man in Texas with a farm, provided he furnished the site for it.</p>
 			<p>“Andy was especial inroaded by self-esteem at our success, the rudiments of the scheme having originated in his own surmises and premonitions. He got off the safe and lit the biggest cigar in the house.</p>
@@ -42,7 +42,7 @@
 			<p>“ ‘I’m the crater of a volcano,’ says he. ‘I’m all aflame and crammed inside with an assortment of words and phrases that have got to have an exodus. I can feel millions of synonyms and parts of speech rising in me,’ says he, ‘and I’ve got to make a speech of some sort. Drink,’ says Andy, ‘always drives me to oratory.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘It could do no worse,’ says I.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘From my earliest recollections,’ says he, ‘alcohol seemed to stimulate my sense of recitation and rhetoric. Why, in Bryan’s second campaign,’ says Andy, ‘they used to give me three gin rickeys and I’d speak two hours longer than Billy himself could on the silver question. Finally, they persuaded me to take the gold cure.’</p>
-			<p>“ ‘If you’ve got to get rid of your excess verbiage,’ says I, ‘why not go out on the river bank and speak a piece? It seems to me there was an old spell-binder named Cantharides that used to go and disincorporate himself of his windy numbers along the seashore.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘If you’ve got to get rid of your excess verbiage,’ says I, ‘why not go out on the river bank and speak a piece? It seems to me there was an old spellbinder named Cantharides that used to go and disincorporate himself of his windy numbers along the seashore.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘No,’ says Andy, ‘I must have an audience. I feel like if I once turned loose people would begin to call Senator Beveridge the Grand Young Sphinx of the Wabash. I’ve got to get an audience together, Jeff, and get this oral distension assuaged or it may turn in on me and I’d go about feeling like a deckle-edge edition de luxe of <abbr>Mrs.</abbr> E. D. E. N. Southworth.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘On what special subject of the theorems and topics does your desire for vocality seem to be connected with?’ I asks.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘I ain’t particular,’ says Andy. ‘I am equally good and varicose on all subjects. I can take up the matter of Russian immigration, or the poetry of John W. Keats, or the tariff, or Kabyle literature, or drainage, and make my audience weep, cry, sob and shed tears by turns.’</p>
@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@
 			<p>“So Andy goes out of the Blue Snake, and I see him stopping men on the street and talking to ’em. By and by he has half a dozen in a bunch listening to him; and pretty soon I see him waving his arms and elocuting at a good-sized crowd on a corner. When he walks away they string out after him, talking all the time; and he leads ’em down the main street of Bird City with more men joining the procession as they go. It reminded me of the old legerdemain that I’d read in books about the Pied Piper of Heidsieck charming the children away from the town.</p>
 			<p>“One o’clock came; and then two; and three got under the wire for place; and not a Bird citizen came in for a drink. The streets were deserted except for some ducks and ladies going to the stores. There was only a light drizzle falling then.</p>
 			<p>“A lonesome man came along and stopped in front of the Blue Snake to scrape the mud off his boots.</p>
-			<p>“ ‘Pardner,’ says I, ‘what has happened? This morning there was hectic gaiety afoot; and now it seems more like one of them ruined cities of Tyre and Siphon where the lone lizard crawls on the walls of the main port-cullis.’</p>
+			<p>“ ‘Pardner,’ says I, ‘what has happened? This morning there was hectic gaiety afoot; and now it seems more like one of them ruined cities of Tyre and Siphon where the lone lizard crawls on the walls of the main portcullis.’</p>
 			<p>“ ‘The whole town,’ says the muddy man, ‘is up in Sperry’s wool warehouse listening to your side-kicker make a speech. He is some gravy on delivering himself of audible sounds relating to matters and conclusions,’ says the man.</p>
 			<p>“ ‘Well, I hope he’ll adjourn, sine qua non, pretty soon,’ says I, ‘for trade languishes.’</p>
 			<p>“Not a customer did we have that afternoon. At six o’clock two Mexicans brought Andy to the saloon lying across the back of a burro. We put him in bed while he still muttered and gesticulated with his hands and feet.</p>