oney
a-plenty to carry him along, an' he talks some o' settin' up a store
somewhars."

In the course of a month or so he carried out the plan, selecting
Talbot's Cross-roads as the site for the store in question. He engaged
hands to erect a frame building, collected by the assistance of some
mysterious agency a heterogeneous stock consisting of calicoes, tinware,
coffee, sugar, tobacco, and various waif and stray commodities, and,
having done so, took his seat on the porch one morning and announced the
establishment open.

Upon the whole, the enterprise was a success. Barnesville was fifteen
miles distant, and the farmers, their wives and daughters, were glad
enough to stop at the Cross-roads for their calico dresses and
store-coffee. By doing so they were saved a long ride and gained superior
conversational advantages. "D'Willerby's mighty easy to trade with," it
was said.

There was always a goodly number of "critters" tied to the fence-corners,
and consequently to business was added the zest of society and the
interchanging of gossip. "D'Willerby's" became a centre of interest and
attraction, and D'Willerby himself a county institution.

Big Tom, however, studiously avoided taking a too active part in the
duties of the establishment. Having with great forethought provided
himself with a stout chair which could be moved from behind the counter
to the door, and from the door to the store as the weather demanded, he
devoted himself almost exclusively to sitting in it and encouraging a
friendly and accommodating spirit in his visitors and admirers. The more
youthful of those admirers he found useful in the extreme.

"Boys," he would say, "a man can't do more than a thousand things at
once. A man can't talk a steady stream and do himself justice, and settle
the heftiest kind of questions, and say the kind of things these ladies
ought to have said to 'em, and then measure out molasses and weigh coffee
and slash off calico dresses and trade for eggs. Some of you've got to
roust out and do some clerking, or I've got to quit. I've not got the
constitution to stand it. Jim, you 'tend to Mis' Pike, and Bill, you wait
on Mis' Jones. Lord! Lord! half a dozen of you here, and not one doing a
thing--not a derned thing! Do you want me to get up and leave Miss
Mirandy and do things myself? We've got to settle about the colour of
this gown. How'd you feel now, if it wasn't becoming to her complexion?
Just help yourself to that p