Arctics and Lumberman’s Overs he passed by with a grin as inappropriate to the climate.  Cod Liver Oil failed to interest him, as did the Provident Cast Iron Range and the Clean-Press Cider Mill.  But he paused speculatively before Punching Bags, for he had the clean pride of body, typical of lusty Western youth, and loved all forms of exercise.  Could he find space, he wondered, to install 6 T 1441 with its Scientific Noiseless Platform & Wall Attachment (6 T 1476) in the portable house (55 S 17) which, purchased a year before, now stood in the clearing behind the station crammed with purchases from the Sears-Roebuck wonderbook.  Anyway, he would make another note of it.  What would it be like, he wondered, to have a million dollars to spend, and unlimited access to the Sears-Roebuck treasures.  Picturing himself as such a Croesus, he innocently thought that his first act would be to take train for Chicago and inspect the warehoused accumulations of those princes of trade with his own eager eyes!

He mused humorously for a moment over a book on “Ease in Conversation.”  ("No trouble about conversation,” he reflected; “the difficulty is to find anybody to converse with,” and he thought first of Carlotta, and then of Miss Camilla Van Arsdale, but chiefly of the latter, for conversation had not been the strong point of the passionate, light-hearted Spanish girl.) Upon a volume kindly offering to teach astronomy to the lay mind without effort or trouble (43 T 790) and manifestly cheap at $1.10, he bestowed a more respectful attention, for the desert nights were long and lonely.

Eventually he arrived at the department appropriate to his age and the almost universal ambition of the civilized male, to wit, clothing.  Deeply, judiciously, did he meditate and weigh the advantages as between 745 J 460 ("Something new—­different—­economical—­efficient.  An all-wool suit embodying all the features that make for clothes satisfaction.  This announcement is of tremendous importance”—­as one might well have inferred from the student’s rapt expression) and 776 J 017 ("A double-breasted, snappy, yet semi-conservative effect in dark-green worsted, a special social value"), leaning to the latter because of a purely literary response to that subtle and deft appeal of the attributive “social.”  The devotee of Messrs. Sears-Roebuck was an innately social person, though as yet his gregarious proclivities lay undeveloped and unsuspected by himself.  Also he was of a literary tendency; but of this he was already self-conscious.  He passed on to ulsters and raincoats, divagated into the colorful realm of neckwear, debated scarf-pins and cuff-links, visualized patterned shirtings, and emerged to dream of composite sartorial grandeurs which, duly synthesized into a long list of hopeful entries, were duly filed away within the pages of 3 T 9901, the pocket ledger.

Footsteps shuffling along the right of way dispelled his visions.  He looked up to see two pedestrians who halted at his movement.  They were paired typically of that strange fraternity, the hobo, one being a grizzled, hard-bitten man of waning middle age, the other a vicious and scrawny boy of eighteen or so.  The boy spoke first.