“And him, I may say, just rotten rich!” he thought.

Mr. Shrimplin further discovered that though the lamps were lit they were burning low, and he concluded that they had been lighted in the early dusk of the winter afternoon and that McBride, for reasons of economy, had deferred turning them up until it should be quite dark.

“Well, I’m a poor man, but I couldn’t think of them things like he does!” reflected Mr. Shrimplin; and then even before he had ceased to pride himself on his superior liberality, he made still another discovery, and this, that the store door stood wide open to the night.

“Well,” thought Mr. Shrimplin, “maybe he’s saving oil, but he’s wasting fuel.”

Approaching the door he peered in.  The store was empty, Archibald McBride was nowhere visible.  Evidently the door had been open some little time, for he could see where the snow, driven by the strong wind, had formed a miniature snow-drift just beyond the threshold.

“Either he’s stepped out and the door’s blowed open,” muttered Mr. Shrimplin, “or he’s in his back office and some customer went out without latching it.”

He paused irresolutely, then he put his hand on the knob of the door to close it, and paused again.  With his taste for fictitious horrors, usually indulged in, however, by his own warm fireside, he found the present time and place slightly disquieting; and then Bill’s singular and erratic behavior had rather weakened his nerve.  From under knitted brows he gazed into the room.  The storm rattled the shuttered windows above his head, the dingy sign creaked on its rusty fastenings, and with each fresh gust the bracketed lamps rocked gently to and fro, and as they rocked their trembling shadows slid back and forth along the walls.  The very air of the place was inhospitable, forbidding, and Mr. Shrimplin was strongly inclined to close the door and beat a hasty retreat.

Still peering down the narrow room with its sagging shelves and littered counters, he crossed the threshold.  Now he could see the office, a space partitioned off at the rear of the building and having a glass front that gave into the store itself.  Here, as he knew, stood Mr. McBride’s big iron safe, and here was the high desk, his heavy ledgers—­row after row of them; these histories of commerce covered almost the entire period during which men had bought and sold in Mount Hope.

A faint light burned beyond the dirty glass partition, but the tall meager form of the old merchant was nowhere visible.  Mr. Shrimplin advanced yet farther into the room and urged by his sense of duty and his public spirit, he directed his steps toward the office, treading softly as one who fears to come upon the unexpected.  Once he paused, and addressing the empty air, broke the heavy silence: 

“Oh, Mr. McBride, your door’s open!”

The room echoed to his words.

“Well,” carped Mr. Shrimplin, “I don’t see as it’s any of my business to attend to his business!” But the very sound of his voice must have given him courage, for now he stepped forward, briskly.