treat folks fair and square, leastway in the long run. That fellow down to Washington Hills is doin’ pretty well now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he got into trouble before many years are gone. Folks don’t mind being cheated for awhile, but they get tired of it in the end. There was a man came here last Fall with a lot of signs he wanted me to buy; cards, they were, that you put in the window and around the store. Awfully pretty, too; looked like pictures, most. But I didn’t take to them. Mostly they was signs like ‘Our Prices can’t be Beat’ and ‘As good as Any, Better’n Many’ and ‘Our Prices are the Lowest in Town.’ Well, course that last was true enough, because this is the only store here, but most of them was sort of prevaricating. I told the man so. I said if he had any real honest signs to fetch ’em out and I’d look at ’em. But, if you’ll believe it, he didn’t have one! My husband used to say that you could cheat a man once, and maybe twice, but you couldn’t cheat him the third time because he wouldn’t give you a chance. And I guess that’s about the way it is. I’ll get a nice big piece of cardboard, sir, and the marking pot.”
