CHAPTER XIX

You can bet we all caught the one-o’clock train, and we enjoyed the ride to the city, for all that we were going on such important business, and for all of the fact that none of us had the least idea in the world what we were going to do but Mark. He knew. You could tell by the way he acted that he knew exactly, and was going to do it or bust. There was just one surprise, and that was that Amassa P. Wiggamore got on the same train. He didn’t see us, because he rode in the parlor-car and we rode in the regular coach. Mark said he judged we’d see more of him before we got back home again. We did.

When we got to the city we went to the hotel we knew about and got two rooms, and then we had supper and walked around a little, looking in windows and at folks on the street, and had a bully time. Mark set a record for eating peanuts. He got away with three bags between seven o’clock and nine, when we went to bed, and they were good big bags, too. Each of us ate a bag, but he said it was his duty to eat just as much as we did, so he had to have one for each of us.

He woke us up in the morning, and saw to it that when we dressed we fixed up special and neat, because he let on that when you were going to see big business men it made a heap of difference how you looked and whether they got a good impression of you right off. He made me tie my tie three times, and Binney had to comb his hair over, and Tallow had to shine up his shoes. I got kind of scared on account of making such preparations as that. I tell you things are pretty serious when a fellow has to be as fussy as Mark seemed to be.

Anyhow, he got us dressed to suit him, and then we had breakfast, and then we started out to an address that Mark had found out before he left Wicksville. We walked, and it was quite a ways, but we knew there wasn’t any use getting there too early. Our experience with the railroad men proved that. We figured we would get there about nine o’clock, which we