Raymond Burton unbuttoned his coat and threw back the collar, when a cheery voice said, “Hello, Burton, you got in? Hardly expected you to-night, the roads are so full. Throw off your coat and warm yourself, and then go up to Mrs. Goode’s boarding-house and make yourself at home. I have arranged accommodation for you there. She is one of our best customers, and she runs a good house.”
There was nothing stand-offish about Gardiner. He met his employees on a basis of friendship and equality, and had a ready way with him that was continually swelling his list of customers, notwithstanding the competition of the Sempter Trading Co., the oldest and strongest mercantile firm in the town. Indeed, Gardiner was little more than a boy himself, who, a few years before, had come up from one of the Eastern Provinces to engage in business in the West.
Gardiner walked around to the boarding-house with Burton, after giving a boy a quarter to deliver the trunk. Mrs. Goode, herself, answered the bell. She was a sprightly, motherly woman, with a quick step, a ready tongue, and a hearty laugh; hair that hinted of fifty, but a smile that said she was twenty-five; and, withal, not entirely blind to her own accomplishments.
“This is my new clerk, Mr. Burton, Mrs. Goode,” said Gardiner. “I brought him here because I knew the house you run. He has driven most of the day, and just needs one of your hot suppers to make him feel the luck he has in being one of Mrs. Goode’s boarders.”
“Well, I do give a good supper, if I say it myself,” said Mrs. Goode. “No hungry people in my house, if I know it. But you want to go to your room. Alice, show Mr. Butler to room sixteen. Sweet sixteen, I call it, and I always save it for the young men,” she added, with a coquettish glance at her new customer.
Alice Goode, aged eighteen, emerged from the dining-room, and Burton having been introduced, as “Mr. Garden’s new clerk,” she demurely led the young man upstairs. “I hope you will like your room,” she said, and, the business obligations of the situation discharged, continued, “Do you dance?”
“Why, a little,” Burton admitted. “But I never learned, properly. Just country dances, you know.”
“Gee, that’s all is any good, anyway. None of your city camel-strides for me, but a good turkey-in-the-straw alamen-lefter an’ you can count me in every trip. There’s a hop on at Grant’s to-night. Going?”