“I can’t. I just can’t. I wish I could.” He shook his head as if to shake loose all those tics and twitches. “Maybe this way. I’ll go as high as twenty-six hundred. For that, will you give me Earth and just fishing rights and buried treasure rights on the Moon? You keep the mineral rights. I’ll do without them.”

“Make it twenty-eight hundred, and you can have the mineral rights, too. You want them, I can tell you do. Treat yourself. Just two hundred bucks more, and you can have them.”

“I can’t have everything. Some things cost too much. How about twenty-six fifty, without the mineral rights and without the buried treasure rights?”

We were both really swinging now. I could feel it.

“This is my absolutely last offer,” I told him. “I can’t spend all day on this. I’ll go down to twenty-seven hundred and fifty, and not a penny less. For that, I’ll give you Earth, and just fishing rights on the Moon. Or just buried treasure rights. You pick whichever one you want.”

“All right,” he said. “You’re a hard man: we’ll do it your way.”

“Twenty-seven fifty for the Earth, and either fishing or buried treasure rights on the Moon?”

“No, twenty-seven even, and no rights on the Moon. I’ll forget about that. Twenty-seven even, and all I get is the Earth.”

“Deal!” I sang out, and we struck hands. We shook on it.

Then, with my arm around his shoulders—what did I care about the dirt on his clothes when the guy was worth twenty-seven hundred dollars to me?—we marched back to the drug store.

“I want a receipt,” he reminded me.

“Right,” I said. “But I put the same stuff on it: that I’m selling you whatever equity I own or have a right to sell. You’re getting a lot for your money.”

“You’re getting a lot of money for what you’re selling,” he came right back. I liked him. Twitches and dirt or not, he was my kind of guy.