"
Or, maybe, the invitation is not so sweeping, and holds a reservation:
"Spend the night with me! I'll not stop you; I'll let you leave afore
breakfast."
Over any gathering at the store a pall of silence descends when a
stranger rides up. If the newcomer is a new drummer unfamiliar with the
ways of the mountains, if he comes imbued with the belief that the voice
with the smile wins, and talkatively radiates his individual idea of
fellowship and democracy, one by one his auditors silently drop away. To
them, an insincere, a false note of democracy has been struck. Perhaps
around the door there will linger some of the mountain boys waiting to
satisfy their curiosity over the contents of the drummer's cases.
John Marion Rains always listens to the story of prices, but his shelves
are really replenished by the drummers who drive to the barn instead of
the store, who unhitch their own horses and feed them from the
storekeeper's supply of corn, who come into the center of the crowd only
after they have unobtrusively lingered awhile in the fringe of it.
One afternoon one of these mountaineers who had withdrawn to the porch,
unhitched, without being solicited, a drummer's horse, and he had
trouble in pulling off a loose shoe and renailing it. The drummer wanted
to pay for the work, but the mountaineer shook his head.
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