Betsey Pilrig shook her head. “Thurley,” she said, lapsing into old-time phraseology, “I guess there’s no danger of your ever comin’ in with your leg in your arm. I guess if you see your comeupment ahead, you’ll manage to sing your way out of it.” CHAPTER V So it was that in 1912 the second thrilling event happened. Young Daniel Birge, proprietor of Birge’s General Dry Goods Store, successor to Submit Curler, left his office, a built-up perch back of the shoe counter, to meet Thurley Precore at four o’clock. The four clerks knew he was going to meet Thurley, that he had been meeting her and would continue to do so every pleasant afternoon, and they might as well ask any questions they wished before this hour, because business did not enter their handsome young proprietor’s head again until he was forced to re-enter the store the next morning. The clerks, three of whom were under twenty and in love with Dan and one of whom was nearing fifty and longed to put him “dead to rights,” exchanged knowing glances as they watched Dan stalk out of the store humming a popular air and nodding a jaunty good night. Birge’s Corners naturally had expected something of Dan Birge—who wouldn’t of the only son of a saloon keeper and man of money, according to the Corners’ estimate, who had been brought up at the Hotel Button and permitted to do as he liked? Having so far escaped the gallows, Dan had proceeded to shock the natives as much as was possible. He began at sixteen, when, “like a streak of grease lightnin’,” according to Prince Hawkins, he started in to educate himself by mail order courses, having skipped school and defied teachers years without end. With the Birge determination, once started in any direction, Dan no longer haunted the barroom or the blacksmith’s shop; he went to Betsey Pilrig’s house, where her adopted daughter, Thurley Precore, welcomed and studied with him. Lorraine McDowell, the minister’s daughter, would have been only too glad to teach Dan Birge, the gossips had it, but Dan had never known Lorraine existed from the day Thurley had first “sung for her supper.” Too proud to admit such was the case, Lorraine had sensibly set to work to be as useful as any minister’s daughter ought to be in a small town, and if she had her own particular form of heartache when she saw Dan and Thurley walking or riding together or taking supper at the Hotel Button, she kept it well concealed and smiled upon them and every one else alike. After Dan had been “learning” for two years, while his father bragged that his son would outrival college professors—and all by mail, too—the older Birge died from an apoplectic stroke, leaving Dan his heir with the flourishing tavern, blacksmith’s shop and real estate office to take in hand.