on him that I hain't mentioned. But he put up a
great show of doin' it to obleege me. Wa'al, I thanked him an' so on,
an' when we'd got through I ast him if he wouldn't step over to the
'Eagil' an' take somethin', an' he looked kind o' shocked an' said he
never drinked nothin'. It was 'gin his princ'ples, he said. Ho, ho, ho,
ho! Scat my----! Princ'ples!" and John heard him chuckling to himself
all the way out of the office.

CHAPTER II

Considering John's relations with David Harum, it was natural that he
should wish to think as well of him as possible, and he had not (or
thought he had not) allowed his mind to be influenced by the disparaging
remarks and insinuations which had been made to him, or in his presence,
concerning his employer. He had made up his mind to form his opinion
upon his own experience with the man, and so far it had not only been
pleasant but favorable, and far from justifying the half-jeering,
half-malicious talk that had come to his ears. It had been made manifest
to him, it was true, that David was capable of a sharp bargain in
certain lines, but it seemed to him that it was more for the pleasure of
matching his wits against another's than for any gain involved. Mr.
Harum was an experienced and expert horseman, who delighted above all
things in dealing in and trading horses, and John soon discovered that,
in that community at least, to get the best of a "hoss-trade" by almost
any means was considered a venial sin, if a sin at all, and the
standards of ordinary business probity were not expected to govern those
transactions.

David had said to him once when he suspected that John's ideas might
have sustained something of a shock, "A hoss-trade ain't like anythin'
else. A feller may be straighter 'n a string in ev'rythin' else, an'
never tell the truth--that is, the hull truth--about a hoss. I trade
hosses with hoss-traders. They all think they know as much as I do, an'
I dunno but what they do. They hain't learnt no diff'rent anyway, an'
they've had chances enough. If a feller come to me that didn't think he
knowed anythin' about a hoss, an' wanted to buy on the square, he'd git,
fur's I knew, square treatment. At any rate I'd tell him all 't I knew.
But when one o' them smart Alecks comes along an' cal'lates to do up old
Dave, why he's got to take his chances, that's all. An' mind ye,"
asserted David, shaking his forefinger impressively, "it ain't only them
fellers. I've ben wuss st