"Now, I begins to think to myself that perhaps there was somethin' in
what that little Jew gal was sayin', and that I might make something out
of the gal after all. I didn't count on gettin' a big pile out of old
Groppeltacker,--it wasn't likely he was that kind of a man,--but
whatever I did get would be clean profit, and I might as well try it on.
He couldn't make no charge ag'in me fur bringin' him his daughter, if
she asked me to do it; so says I to her, 'Now, if I take you home to
your Pop, will you promise on your word an' honour, that you won't say
nothin' about my carryin' you off in a bag, and say that you seed me
walkin' along the road and liked my looks, and told me you were
sufferin', and asked me to take you home to your kind parents, where you
might be took proper care of; and that I said I wasn't goin' that way,
but I'd do it out of pure Christian charity, and nothin' more nor less,
and here you was? And then, of course, you can tell him he ought to do
the handsome thing by me.'--'I'll do that,' says she, 'and I tell how
you talked to me awful kind for more than an hour, tryin' to keep me to
stay at the school, and it wasn't till I got down on my knees and weeped
that you agreed to take me to my kind father.'--'All right,' says I, 'I
might as well take you along, but we'll have to go back by the railroad
and foot it, at least two miles, to the station, and I don't know about
walkin' across the country with a little girl dressed as fine as you
are. I might get myself suspicioned.'--'That's so,' says she; 'we might
meet somebody that'd know me,' and then she wriggled up her little
forehead and began to think. I never did see such a little gal as sharp
as that one was; needles was nothin' to her. In about a minute she says,
'Where's that bag of yourn?'--'Here it is,' says I; and then she took it
and looked at it up and down, with her head cocked on one side. 'If I'd
somethin' to cut that bag with,' says she, 'I could fix myself up so
that nobody'd know me, don't care who it was.'--'I don't want that bag
cut,' says I; 'it's an extry good bag; it was made for a particular
purpose, and cost money.'--'Pop will pay expenses,' says she; 'how much
did it cost?'--'It was four dollars cash,' said I.--'They cheated you
like everything,' says she; 'you could get a bag like that any day for a
dollar and seventy-five cents. Will you let it go at that?'--'All
right,' says I, for I was tickled to see how sharp that little Jew gal
was, and ten to one I'd throwed away the bag before we got to town; so
she pulled a little book out of her pocket with a pencil stuck in it,
and turnin' over to a blank page she put down, 'Bag, one dollar and
seventy-five;' then she borrows my big knife, and holdin' the top of the
bag up ag'in her belt, she made me stick a pin in it about a
hand's-breadth from the floor; then she took the knife and cut the bag
clean across, me a-holdin' one side of it; then she took the top end of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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