Yet the town had to admit that Dan built up the Corners more than any of his ancestors or contemporaries. He ventured money in a moving picture show and made it pay, mollifying the churches by turning over the proceeds of the Passion Play for a new carpet for a Sunday-school room and new front steps for the rival denomination. He installed an ice cream soda fountain in Oyster Jim’s store, lending the old man the money, and started the vogue for modern sidewalks and a town clock—and even a manicure! There was no telling to what lengths he might have gone, if he had not been so in love with Thurley that she occupied his thoughts twenty-three and a half hours out of the twenty-four, but he managed to do wonders with the remaining half hour. The town often said he no doubt would have borrowed their farm teams to make polo ponies, and it was suspected that he was striving frantically to “get up a board of health.” Certain it was that Dan was not afraid to spend his money—some declared it was a hundred thousand and some a hundred and ten thousand. And, most glorious achievement of all, he liberally pensioned Submit Curler, whose eyes were too dim to tell basting thread from sewing silk. When Dan would try to convince Ali Baba of some needed modern enterprise, Ali Baba would retort angrily, “Who made you so wise and your elders fools? Be careful or you’ll catch brain fever and be as bald as a badger!” To which Dan would answer good-naturedly, “No doubt of it—didn’t you know that grass never grows on a busy street?” Which would leave Ali Baba chuckling, “Land sakes and Mrs. Davis, if that boy hasn’t a little Irish in him—dead dog eat a hatchet!” No one could say Dan underpaid or cheated any person with whom he had dealings. His store had an up-to-date, live air and one could find bargains and articles which had never been seen in former days. Also, when travelling men came to sell him and he entertained them at his attempted bachelor apartments, they would suggest a game of penny-ante and something to drink, and the boy would inform them with no shrinking indecision, “I was raised watching men make fools of themselves,” and bid them good night. When he married Thurley Precore, the town gossiped, Dan would meet his match, and, in concluding their jeremiad, said they doubted whether Thurley would marry him after all, but if, for spite, he married Lorraine, who, goodness knows, would jump sky high if she ever had the chance, Dan Birge would be the same bully his father had been to his wife—there never was a Birge who didn’t have to boss the job or quit!