sold in the course of fifteen
days.

In those fifteen days Lambert had traveled five hundred miles, by the
power of his own sturdy legs, by the grace of his bicycle, which had
held up until this day without protest over the long, sandy, rocky,
dismal roads, and he had lived on less than a gopher, day taken by day.

Housekeepers were not pining for the combination potato-parer,
apple-corer, can-opener, tack-puller, known as the "All-in-One" in any
reasonable proportion.

It did not go. Indisputably it was a good thing, and well built, and
finished like two dollars' worth of cutlery. The selling price, retail,
was one dollar, and it looked to an unsophisticated young graduate of
an agricultural college to be a better opening toward independence and
the foundation of a farm than a job in the hay fields. A man must make
his start somewhere, and the farther away from competition the better
his chance.

This country to which the general agent had sent him was becoming more
and more sparsely settled. The chances were stretching out against him
with every mile. The farther into that country he should go the smaller
would become the need for that marvelous labor-saving invention.

Lambert had passed the last house before noon, when his sixty-five-pound
bicycle had suffered a punctured tire, and there had bargained with a
Scotch woman at the greasy kitchen door with the smell of curing
sheepskins in it for his dinner. It took a good while to convince the
woman that the All-in-One was worth it, but she yielded out of pity for
his hungry state. From that house he estimated that he had made fifteen
miles before the tire gave out; since then he had added ten or twelve
more to the score. Nothing that looked like a house was in sight, and
it was coming on dusk.

He labored on, bent in spirit, sore of foot. From the rise of a hill,
when it had fallen so dark that he was in doubt of the road, he heard a
voice singing. And this was the manner of the song:

_Oh, I bet my money on a bob-tailed hoss,
An' a hoo-dah, an' a hoo-dah;
I bet my money on a bob-tailed hoss,
An' a hoo-dah bet on the bay._

The singer was a man, his voice an aggravated tenor with a shake to it
like an accordion, and he sang that stanza over and over as Lambert
leaned on his bicycle and listened.

Lambert went down the hill. Presently the shape of trees began to form
out of the valley. Behind that barrier the man was doing his singing,