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.