"No, thank you," interrupted Tom. "I don't think we care to look at any to-day. If you could put us on the track of the one we saw, we might get that, and then we could buy others of you." He added this as a bait to the trader.
"Well, I'm very sorry, but I can't, for the life of me, think of the name of the man who took that old chair," declared the dealer. "But if it was a spinning wheel now, or something in Mission, I could----"
"Come on, fellows," interrupted Tom, sadly. "I--I guess we don't want anything to-day."
"Now I've got a real gem in Louis the Fourteenth," went on the man eagerly.
"Or a Colonial sideboard and a warming pan--a warming pan is dead swell in the room of a college lad."
"Let's jolly him along," whispered Frank Simpson. "We want to get on the trail of that Hebrew. Now if we buy--say, a warming pan, of this man, he may give us more information."
"Right!" whispered Tom, eagerly. "Why didn't I think of it myself? Of course! We do need a warming pan," he went on, winking at Phil and Sid, who at first thought their chum was out of his mind. "Now if we could get a nice copper one, pretty good sized, it might do in place of the chair."
"For you to sit on," murmured Sid, keeping a straight face.
"I've got just what you want!" declared the dealer, happy now at the prospect of business. "Come back this way to the warming pan department. I've got one that came over in the vessel that followed the _Mayflower_."
"It must have been the _Jilliflower_," murmured Sid, with a silent chuckle.
Half an hour later Tom Parsons and his chums left the antique upholstering shop, richer in the possession of an old warming pan, which they did not want, poorer in the sum of six dollars, but also possessing more information than they at first had regarding the Hebrew to whom had been traded their old chair--or, at least, the chair they hoped would prove to be theirs.
"His name is a common Hebrew one," the dealer told them, when he had been thawed out by the trade, "but I don't believe it was Cohen. Anyhow, he lives on the Medford Road, just beyond the village of Rosevale. I remember that, because he told me how long it took him to drive in from there. But if he shouldn't have the chair on which you fellows seem so bent, I can fix you up. I've got an ancient Colonial one that----"