"You can't have service without paying the bills, Mr. Pape. Just what I was trying to tell you at your hotel last evening. Your sign burns up credit, I tell you. It won't light up another night until----"
"Until I fuel up, eh?" Already Pape had pulled from pocket a wallet fat with bills freshly parked for ransom against any possible expense of New York justice. "This will cover the bill with a couple of centuries in advance for a few days future service. Express my apologies to Mr. Edison. Explain that the reason you couldn't make me dig up last night was because I had an engagement to dig down. You might add that it was with some one to whom the welcome sign had made me welcome. You can say for me that my career since he howdy-dooed me in watts and kilowatts would make a live-wire ad. for the concern. The facts ain't ready for rose-wreathed publicity yet--not yet awhile--but they would turn the president of a gas company into an enthusiastic rooter for electric signs."
Pape chuckled from more than appreciation of his own pithy remarks--with more than satisfaction at overly paying an over-due bill, as he waved a hand in cordial _au revoir_ and started out the stable. He considered this elimination of his eye-brow mustached caller--the out-speeding of his third shadow, so to say--a good omen. With like conclusiveness would he in time dispose of the tack-faced Welch and Duffy of the vegetable ear, not to mention any foes unidentified as yet, such as the ring-leader of the plot against the Lauderdales and his own quarry in Gotham's underbrush, that promoter of Montana Gusher oil stock.
He felt convinced that luck again was with him when, at the end of his ride to the wharf-studded bank of the Hudson River, he found that for once the West Shore Road had not disappointed a consignee. In one of the high-fenced, unroofed pens of a wholesale butcher stood twenty-five or thirty sleek steers, red splotched with white, upon the rump of each the interrogation brand of the Queer Question Ranch.
The range smell of the beasts caused Dot's nostrils to quiver from delight over the reminder of home; caused his hind-hoofs to polka about the yard and his fore to lift in a proffered horseshoe shake to the beef handlers, one and all. And Pape himself felt hugely pleased over the showing of his product in this "foreign" market, for which they had been bred and fed.