Miss Martin took the hesitating awkwardness of the next man presenting himself before her, not daring to ask the higher price and not willing to take the lower, for rustic bashfulness, and put him at his ease by saying airily, “Five cords?  That makes thirty-five dollars.  I always pay seven dollars a cord.”  After that, the procession of grinning men driving lumber-sleds toward the library became incessant.  The minister attempted to remonstrate with the respectable men of his church for cheating a poor young lady, but they answered roughly that it wasn’t her money but Camden’s, who had tossed them the library as a man would toss a penny to a beggar, who had now quite forgotten about them, and, finally, who had made his money none too honestly.

Since he had become of so much importance to them they had looked up his successful career in the Chicago wheat pit, and, undazzled by the millions involved, had penetrated shrewdly to the significance of his operations.  The record of his colossal and unpunished frauds had put to sleep, so far as he was concerned, their old minute honesty.  It was considered the best of satires that the man who had fooled all the West should be fooled in his turn by a handful of forgotten mountaineers, that they should be fleecing him in little things as he had fleeced Chicago in great.  There was, however, an element which frowned on this shifting of standards, and, before long, neighbors and old friends were divided into cliques, calling each other, respectively, cheats and hypocrites.  Hillsboro was intolerably dull that winter because of the absence of the usual excitement over the entertainment, and in that stagnation all attention was directed to the new joke on the wheat king.  It was turned over and over, forward and back, and refurbished and made to do duty again and again, after the fashion of rustic jokes.  This one had the additional advantage of lining the pockets of the perpetrators.  They egged one another on to fresh inventions and variations, until even the children, not to be left out, began to have exploits of their own to tell.  The grocers raised the price of kerosene, groaning all the time at the extortions of the oil trust, till the guileless guardian of Mr. Camden’s funds was paying fifty cents a gallon for it.  The boys charged a quarter for every bouquet of pine-boughs they brought to decorate the cold, empty reading-room.  The washer-woman charged five dollars for “doing-up” the lace sash-curtains.  As spring came on, and the damages wrought by the winter winds must be repaired, the carpenters asked wages which made the sellers of firewood tear their hair at wasted opportunities.  They might have raised the price per cord!  The new janitor, hearing the talk about town, demanded a raise in salary and threatened to leave without warning if it were not granted.