As they left the centre of the city Higbee drew Percival to one of the broad side windows.
"Pull up your chair and sit here a minute," he said, with a mysterious little air of importance. "There's a thing this train's going to pass right along here that I want you to look at. Maybe you've seen better ones, of course--and then again--"
It proved to be a sign some twenty feet high and a whole block long. Emblazoned upon its broad surface was "Higbee's Hams." At one end and towering another ten feet or so above the mammoth letters was a white-capped and aproned chef abandoning his mercurial French temperament to an utter frenzy of delight over a "Higbee's Ham" which had apparently just been vouchsafed to him by an invisible benefactor.
"There, now!" exclaimed Higbee; "what do you call that--I want to know--hey?"
"Great! Magnificent!" cried Percival, with the automatic and ready hypocrisy of a sympathetic nature. "That certainly is great."
"Notice the size of it?" queried Higbee, when they had flitted by.
"_Did_ I!" exclaimed the young man, reproachfully.
"We went by pretty fast--you couldn't see it well. I tell you the way they're allowed to run trains so fast right here in this crowded city is an outrage. I'm blamed if I don't have my lawyer take it up with the Board of Aldermen--slaughtering people on their tracks right and left--you'd think these railroad companies owned the earth--But that sign, now. Did you notice you could read every letter in the label on that ham? You wouldn't think it was a hundred yards back from the track, would you? Why, that label by actual measure is six feet, four inches across--and yet it looks as small--and everything all in the right proportion, it's wonderful. It's what I call art," he concluded, in a slightly dogmatic tone.
"Of course it's art," Percival agreed; "er--all--hand-painted, I suppose?"
"Sure! that painting alone, letters and all, cost four hundred and fifty dollars. I've just had it put up. I've been after that place for years, but it was held on a long lease by Max, the Square Tailor--you know. You probably remember the sign he had there--'Peerless Pants Worn by Chicago's Best Dressers' with a man in his shirt sleeves looking at a new pair. Well, finally, I got a chance to buy those two back lots, and that give me the site, and there she is, all finished and up. That's partly what I come on this time to see about. How'd you like the wording of that sign?"