e ear he would whisper: "I see where
Saint Louis has took four straight games off Chicago,"--and so hold him
fascinated to the end.

In the same way he would say to Mr. Smith: "I see where it says that
this 'Flying Squirl' run a dead heat for the King's Plate."

To a humble intellect like mine he would explain in full the relations
of the Keesar to the German Rich Dog.

But first and foremost, Jeff's specialty in the way of conversation
was finance and the money market, the huge fortunes that a man with the
right kind of head could make.

I've known Jefferson to pause in his shaving with the razor suspended
in the air as long as five minutes while he described, with his eye
half closed, exactly the kind of a head a man needed in order to make
a "haul" or a "clean up." It was evidently simply a matter of the head,
and as far as one could judge, Jeff's own was the very type required.
I don't know just at what time or how Jefferson first began his
speculative enterprises. It was probably in him from the start. There
is no doubt that the very idea of such things as Traction Stock and
Amalgamated Asbestos went to his head: and whenever he spoke of Mr.
Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, the yearning tone of his voice made it as
soft as lathered soap.

I suppose the most rudimentary form of his speculation was the hens.
That was years ago. He kept them out at the back of his house,--which
itself stood up a grass plot behind and beyond the barber shop,--and in
the old days Jeff would say, with a certain note of pride in his voice,
that The Woman had sold as many as two dozen eggs in a day to the summer
visitors.

But what with reading about Amalgamated Asbestos and Consolidated Copper
and all that, the hens began to seem pretty small business, and, in
any case, the idea of two dozen eggs at a cent apiece almost makes one
blush. I suppose a good many of us have felt just as Jeff did about our
poor little earnings. Anyway, I remember Jeff telling me one day that
he could take the whole lot of the hens and sell them off and crack
the money into Chicago wheat on margin and turn it over in twenty-four
hours. He did it too. Only somehow when it was turned over it came
upside down on top of the hens.

After that the hen house stood empty and The Woman had to throw away
chicken feed every day, at a dead loss of perhaps a shave and a half.
But it made no difference to Jeff, for his mind had floated away already
on the possibilities