Chronicles of San Lorenzo: V. Old Man Bobo's Mandy [pp. 483-490]

CHRONICLES OF SAN LIOREN ZO.
V. OLD MAN BOBO'S MANDY.
OLD man Bobo was the sole survivor of a
once famous trio. Two out of the three,
Doc Jackson and Uncle Jake Spooner, had
passed to the shades, and the legend ran
-'t is a shriveled chestnut in San Lorenzo
-that when their disembodied spirits
reached the banks of the Styx, the ruling
passion of their lives asserted itself for the
last time. They demurred loudly, impatiently, at the exorbitant fee, ten cents, demanded by Charon.
"We weigh light," said Uncle Jake,
awful light! Call it, mister, fifteen cents
for the two!"
"Ten cents apiece," replied the ferryman, "or three for a quarter."
Thereupon the worthy couple seated
themselves in Cimmerian darkness and
vowed their intention of awaiting old man
Bobo.
" He'11 soon be along," they remarked.
" He must be awful lonesome."
But the old gentleman kept them out of
Hades a full lustrum.
He lived alone with his grand-daughter
and a stable helper in the tumble-down
adobe just to the left of the race track.
The girl, a slender chit of seventeen,
cooked, baked, and washed, for him. Twice
a week she peddled fruit and garden stuff
in San Lorenzo and environs. Of these
sales her grandsire exacted the most rigorous accounting, and occasionally, in recognition of her services, would fling her a
nickel. The old man himself rarely left
home, and might be seen at all hours hobbling around his garden and corrals, keenly
interested in his own belongings, halterbreaking his colts, anxiously watching the
growth of his lettuce, counting the oranges,
and beguiling the fruitful hours with delightful calculation.
"It's all profit," he has often said to me.
We buy nothin' an' we sell every durned
thing we raise."
Then he would chuckle and rub together
his yellow, wrinkled hands. The neighbors
swore that whenever Mr. Bobo laughed it
behooved other folk to look grave.
"Mandy's dress costs something," I observed.
"Considerable,-I'd misremembered that.
Her rig-out las' fall cost me the vally o'
three boxes o' apples - winter pearmains!"
"She will marry soon, Mr. Bobo."
"An' leave me?" he cried shrilly. "I'd
like to see a man prowlin' around my Mandy,
-I'd stimilate him. Besides, mister, Mandy
ain't the marryin' kind. She's homely as a
mud fence, is Mandy. She ain't put up
right for huggin' and kissin'."
"But she is your heiress, Mr. Bobo."
"Heiress," he repeated with a cunning
leer. "I'm poor, mister, poor. The tax
collector has eat me up,- eat me up, I say,
eat me up!"
He looked such an indigestible morsel,
so obviously unfit for the maw of even a
tax collector, that I laughed and took my