See here."
He pulled up a book from behind the seat--a copy of "Lorna
Doone" it was--and showed me the letters _a m_ scrawled in
pencil in the back.
"That means that I paid ten cents for this. Now, if you sell
it for a quarter you've got a safe profit. It costs me about
four dollars a week to run Parnassus--generally less. If you
clear that much in six days you can afford to lay off on Sundays!"
"How do you know that _a m_ stands for ten cents?" I asked.
"The code word's _manuscript_. Each letter stands for a figure,
from 0 up to 9, see?" He scrawled it down on a scrap of paper:
m a n u s c r i p t
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
"Now, you see _a m_ stands for 10, _a n_ would be 12, _n s_ is
24, _a c_ is 15, _a m m_ is $1.00, and so on. I don't pay much
over fifty cents for books as a rule, because country folks
are shy of paying much for them. They'll pay a lot for a
separator or a buggy top, but they've never been taught to
worry about literature! But it's surprising how excited they
get about books if you sell 'em the right kind. Over beyond
Port Vigor there's a farmer who's waiting for me to go
back--I've been there three or four times--and he'll buy about
five dollars' worth if I know him.
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