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Show MILLIONAIRE MINER WANTED SIMPLICITY Washington, D. C Nof long ago a grizzled milionaire miner from the far west dropped into town. He occupied a superb suite in one of Washington's most luxurious hotels during his stay here. Among his callers was a young man from his own state. This young man married, not long ago. a young woman "out home." They got along right tidily on his $1,000 a year, earned as a government clerk. The old miner had not only known the young man from boyhood, but he had ridden the I young man's wife on his knee all the j way to Banbury Cross when she w as a little girl in pigtails. "Son," said the grizzled miner to the young man from his home state, when the latter was making his call at the fine hotel suite, "you and Aggie arc keeping house here, aren't you?" "Well, we're living in a little flat, if that's keeping house." the young man replied. "Well," said the wealthy old miner, "I sure do take it powerful hard you and Aggie don't invite me up to your place and give me something to eat I sure do." The young man started to make some reply, but the old man wasn't through. "I'm getting mighty tired o hotel and restaurant grub," he went on. "I can't get any taste or good out of it it all tastes alike. If you and Aggie only knew how I've been sort o' hankering hank-ering for a good, big fillln' savory layout lay-out of shoulder and greens. I'll bet a box of matches that you'd take pity on me and asked me to your place to have some. Ever have shoulder and greens? Nothing on earth like shoulder and greens, after all. is there?" The young man looked a bit embarrassed. embar-rassed. "Well." he said. "Aggie and I have talked- time and again about asking you to take dinner with us since you came on here this time. But you know what these dinky little three rooms and a bath flats are or do you? And Aggie Ag-gie and I had sort of an . idea that maybe well, to be frank, that, after all the splendiferousness that you're used to. why. it might make you feel sort of uncomfort Oh, ours is 'just a plain little dump, you know, and we thought maybe it would er " "Look a-here. boy," interrupted the old miner, "will you and Aggie give me some shoulder and greens tomorrow evening, say at 6 o'clock?" "You know very well that we'll be delighted to have you," replied the young man. "All right," said the old man. "Write me down the address. I'll be there." "And, Joe," he added as the young man prepared to take his leave, "you'd better warn Aggie about the low-down, ornery, .simmering habits of greens. It takes a lot of greens to make a proper mess of 'em. A pretty whopping basket bas-ket of greens well. Ive seen a bushel, o" greens, almost, boil down to 'most nothing," and then the two laughed and the young man went away. On the following evening the bluff, ruddy, fine-looking old mining man arrived ar-rived at the little flat on the minute. It was a neat and tastefully furnished fiat, but small, of course. "Sure you've got plenty of greens?" the old gentleman inquired, with mock anxiety, when he was greeted by the pretty young matron whom he had known as a child. "I've been worrying a good deal over that today." "Oh. stacks and stacks of greens." she replied, adding, "but if thore shouldn't be enough I could eke out by boiling down the rubber plant, you know." and so the little dinner began merrily enough. The shoulder was a sweet piece of mast-fed meat from Virginia, and after the old miner had tucked his napkin under his chin in the old-fashioned way and gone at it he came pretty close to looking like a thoroughly satisfied elderly el-derly man. "D'ye children know," he said as he passed his plate over for the third help ing, "that I've been in training for this ever since yesterday? Fact. I've hardly eaten a mouthful since you invited -me or, better. Bince I invited myself. And it's worth the fasting." After the dinner the old boy fixed himself in a big rattan chair in the tiny cozy corner near a window, and got .a well-seasoned briar pipe belonging belong-ing to his young host a-going. "A cigar after shoulder and greens!" he exclaimed, reprovingly, when the young man offered him a cigar. "Mighty tidy place you've got here," he said, after a pause, waving his pipe around. "Slick as a crick eel. I'd call it. Plumb luxurious, in fact," and a sort of misty light of recollection appeared ap-peared in the gray old eyes of the man. "I suppose Mary and I wouldn't have looked upon this as a sort of heaven away back yonder in the tangle of years when we were struggling along the best way we knew how." The young matron had been picking out soft little chords on the piano, but she crossed over and sat down by her husband. "Didn't have any such things as cozy corners when Mary and I made our first, start at housekeeping," the old boy went on, crossing his legs and leaning back and puffing away at his pipe. i "Not many scrumtiferous fixin's of any kind, for the matter of that. "Fact is. it was a shack. And. on top of that, a one-room shack. Built it myself after working hours. Cut the scrub spruce and fir to build it. too. "I was a timberman then in a new-silver new-silver mine sixty miles from the railroad. rail-road. Got $25 a week, which wasn't much, counting how costly it was to live. "Well, after I got th- shack built I went down to Boise and asked Mary-she Mary-she was teaching school down there. Mary was agreeable about it we'd been beaus since we'd first met a year before, although after I went to work in the new mine 1 didn't have much chance to see her. "But Mary was ready, and we. got married in Boise City, and I took her to the shack I'd built. Marvelous days, those both of us young, you see. and not bothering much about anything nor minding any sort of inconveniences, so long as we were close enough to each so's I could holler across the gulch on my way to work and on my way home. And it was a home, plumb and proper never had any sucn nome since. "I made the stove myself, too. out of an old rusty two-horse-power boiler that I cribbed from the engine house. Made most of the furniture, too. including includ-ing the bed. spare times. Wagon freighting was costly, and beds and gear like that ready made cost a heap of money out there those days anyhow, they were beyond me. "Had a rag carpet on the floor of the shack that Mary'd been making herself, after school hours, for a year. Dishes were mostly wooden I was pretty-handy pretty-handy with a jackknife those days. Had calico curtains in the one window Mary had an artistic eye, and the way she draped those curtains sure was something dainty. "I got the water from the crick, about 400 yards back of the shack. Used to fill up the three barrels once a week and let the water settle. "Didn't have any fresh meat, unless I shot it o' Sundays freighters used to fetch in the salt meat one a week over the trail. Canned vegetables, too, and scandalously high they were. "I'd started a truck patch, but the soil wasn't adapted to truck raising. All right for flowers, though. Mary got hold of some flower seeds subscribed hold of some flower seeds subscribed to a $l-a-year-weekly, I believe, and got the seeds as a subscription prize and she had the prettiest little garden of flowers in front of the shack you ever saw; sweet william and pansies, and bachelor buttons, and china asters, and marigolds, and old things like those. "She used to sit in that teenchy flower garden of summer evenings and play on the little old ten-stringed zither, fixed out with numbers for each string, that I got for her down at Boise. Mighty fetching and sweet the music from the zither sounded, too. out there in the open air, with the wind stirring through the branches overhead, and Mary with her pretty head and a flower in her dark hair, tilted back against a tree, humming the tunes she played. "Our first born arrived in that shack. The medical man who officiated on that occasion was a fellow who'd been arrested ar-rested and locked up for horse stealing. They allowed him to come to our shack in company with a deputy marshal, and then they took him back to the lockup again. "Well, Mary and I and later, the first one kept house in that little old handmade hand-made shack, squatting at the base of the mountain, for three years. Speaking Speak-ing for myself and if Mary was on earth she'd join me in saying it those were far and away the happiest years of our lives, they sure were." After some music the old man took his leave, with cheery praises for the young wife's dinner of shoulder and greens. The two young people sat pensive pen-sive and silent for quite a while after the old gentleman had gone. "I guess our little old flat isn't so dinky, after all, eh. little woman?" said the young husband then, pinching his wife's cheek. |