"As regards that there pup," says Babe, continuing the clapboarded conversation, "we complained that he was all over the place and--" "Now he's all over us," states Boots, combing a few more fine fragments of dog-hash out of his hair. "I'd say we've had about enough of being helped by this here obliging well-wisher, wouldn't you?" says Babe. "Abso--" says Boots. "--lutely!" says Babe. "I've run plum out of hospi--" says Boots. "--tality!" says Babe. "What we ought to do is take a gun and kill him good--" "--and dead!" says Boots. But they didn't go that far. They make it plain to him though, when he gets back, that the welcome is all petered out and he takes the hint and pikes out for town, leaving those two still sorting what's left of their house-keeping junk out of the wreckage. So it went and so it kept on going. Every time Good Sam set his willing hands to lifting some unfortunate fellow citizen out of a difficulty he won himself at least one more sincere critic before he was through. Even so, as long as he stuck to retailing it wasn't so bad. Certain parts of town he was invited to stay out of but there were other neighborhoods that he could still piroot around in without much danger of being assassinated. It was only when he branched out as a jobber that his waning popularity soured in a single hour. That was when the entire community clabbered on him, as you might say, by acclamation. It happened this way: Other towns east and west of us were having booms, but our town, seemed like, was being left out in the cold. She wasn't growing a particle. So some of the leading people got up a mass-meeting to decide on ways and means of putting Triple Falls on the map. One fellow would rise up and suggest doing this and another fellow would rise up and suggest doing that; but every proposition called for money and about that time money was kind of a scarce article amongst us. So far as I was concerned, it was practically extinct. Along toward the shank of the evening Good Sam took the floor.