That was Herman. He never stopped to ask where they was coming from. He'd make the place look like a Dutch beer garden and they'd just have to come from somewhere, because what German ever saw a beer garden that didn't have people coming to it? I reckoned up that Herman would have enough custom to make the place pay, the quick rate our country is growing, in about two hundred and forty-five or fifty years.
So that's Wagner's Sylvan Glen you seen advertised. It's there all right; and Herman is there, waiting for trade, with a card back of his little bar that says, in big letters: Keep Smiling! I bet if you dropped in this minute you'd find him in a black jacket and white apron, with a bill of fare wrote in purple ink. He thinks people will soon drop in from twenty miles off to get a cheese sandwich or a dill pickle, or something.
Two of the boys was over this last June when he had his grand opening. They was the only person there except a man from Surprise Valley that was looking for stock and got lost. Buck Devine says the place looked as swell as something you'd see round Chicago.
Herman has a scow on the pond, and a dozen little green tables outside under the spruce trees, with all the trees white-washed neatly round the bottoms, and white-washed stones along the driveway, and a rustic gate with Welcome to Wagner's Sylvan Glen! over it. And he's got some green tubs with young spruces planted in 'em, standing under the big spruces, and everything as neat as a pin.
Everyone thinks he's plumb crazy now, even if they didn't when he said Eloise Plummer was as beautiful as the morning star. But you can't tell. He's getting money every month from his uncle in Cincinnati to improve the place. He's sent the uncle a photo of it and it must look good back in Cincinnati, where you can't see the surrounding country.
Maybe Herman merely wants to lead a quiet life with the German poets, and has thought up something to make the uncle come through. On the other hand, mebbe he's a spy. Of course he's got a brain. He's either kidding the uncle, or else Wagner's Sylvan Glen now covers a concrete gun foundation.
In either case he's due for harsh words some day--either from the uncle when he finds there ain't any roadhouse patrons for twenty miles round, or from the German War Office when they find out there ain't even anything to shoot at.