“I’ll let you know,” I says. Then she tried to buy a beer, but I wouldn’t let her. “Keep your money,” I says. “Buy yourself a dress with it.” I gave the maid a five, too. After all, like I say money has no value; it’s just the way you spend it. It dont belong to anybody, so why try to hoard it. It just belongs to the man that can get it and keep it. There’s a man right here in Jefferson made a lot of money selling rotten goods to niggers, lived in a room over the store about the size of a pigpen, and did his own cooking. About four or five years ago he was taken sick. Scared the hell out of him so that when he was up again he joined the church and bought himself a Chinese missionary, five thousand dollars a year. I often think how mad he’ll be if he was to die and find out there’s not any heaven, when he thinks about that five thousand a year. Like I say, he’d better go on and die now and save money.
When it was burned good I was just about to shove the others into my coat when all of a sudden something told me to open Quentin’s before I went home, but about that time Earl started yelling for me up front, so I put them away and went and waited on the damn redneck while he spent fifteen minutes deciding whether he wanted a twenty cent hame string or a thirty-five cent one.
“You’d better take that good one,” I says. “How do you fellows ever expect to get ahead, trying to work with cheap equipment?”
“If this one aint any good,” he says, “why have you got it on sale?”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t any good,” I says, “I said it’s not as good as that other one.”
“How do you know it’s not,” he says. “You ever use airy one of them?”
“Because they dont ask thirty-five cents for it,” I says. “That’s how I know it’s not as good.”