imaginary audience of boys)--"I tell you, if I was to make a million
out of this Cubey, I'd give it straight to the poor, yes, sir--divide
it up into a hundred lots of a thousand dollars each and give it to
the people that hadn't nothing."

So always after that I knew just what those bananas were being grown
for.

Indeed, after that, though Jefferson never spoke of his intentions
directly, he said a number of things that seemed to bear on them. He
asked me, for instance, one day, how many blind people it would take
to fill one of these blind homes and how a feller could get ahold of
them. And at another time he asked whether if a feller advertised for
some of these incurables a feller could get enough of them to make a
showing. I know for a fact that he got Nivens, the lawyer, to draw up
a document that was to give an acre of banana land in Cuba to every
idiot in Missinaba county.

But still,--what's the use of talking of what Jeff meant to do?
Nobody knows or cares about it now.

The end of it was bound to come. Even in Mariposa some of the people
must have thought so. Else how was it that Henry Mullins made such a
fuss about selling a draft for forty thousand on New York? And why
was it that Mr. Smith wouldn't pay Billy, the desk clerk, his back
wages when he wanted to put it into Cuba?

Oh yes; some of them must have seen it. And yet when it came it
seemed so quiet,--ever so quiet,--not a bit like the Northern Star
mine and the oyster supper and the Mariposa band. It is strange how