THE SKIPPER AND THE SKIPPED

Cap'n Aaron Sproul, late skipper of the Jefferson P. Benn, sat by the bedside of his uncle, "One-arm" Jerry, and gazed into the latter's dimming eyes.

"It ain't bein' a crowned head, but it's honer'ble," pleaded the sick man, continuing the conversation.

His eager gaze found only gloominess in his nephew's countenance.

"One way you look at it, Uncle Jed," said the Cap'n, "it's a come-down swifter'n a slide from the foretop the whole length of the boomstay. I've been master since I was twenty-four, and I'm goin' onto fifty-six now. I've licked every kind in the sailorman line, from a nigger up to Six-fingered Jack the Portugee. If it wa'n't for—ow, Josephus Henry!—for this rheumatiz, I'd be aboard the Benn this minute with a marlinespike in my hand, and op'nin' a fresh package of language."

"But you ain't fit for the sea no longer," mumbled One-arm Jerry through one corner of the mouth that paralysis had drawn awry.

"That's what I told the owners of the Benn when I fit 'em off'm me and resigned," agreed the Cap'n. "I tell ye, good skippers ain't born ev'ry minute—and they knowed it. I've been turnin' 'em in ten per cent. on her, and that's good property. I've got an eighth into her myself, and with a man as good as I am to run her, I shouldn't need to worry about doin' anything else all my life—me a single man with no one dependent. I reckon I'll sell. Shipmasters ain't what they used to be."

"Better leave it where it is," counselled Jerry, his cautious thrift dominating even in that hour of death. "Land-sharks is allus lookin' out sharp for sailormen that git on shore."

"It's why I don't dast to go into business—me that's follered the sea so long," returned the skipper, nursing his aching leg.

"Then do as I tell ye to do," said the old man on the bed. "It may be a come-down for a man that's had men under him all his life, but it amounts to more'n five hundred a year, sure and stiddy. It's something to do, and you couldn't stand it to loaf—you that's always been so active. It ain't reskin' anything, and with all the passin' and the meetin' folks, and the gossipin' and the chattin', and all that, all your time is took up. It's honer'ble, it's stiddy. Leave your money where it is, take my place, and keep this job in the family."

The two men were talking in a little cottage at the end of a long covered bridge. A painted board above the door heralded the fact that the cottage was the toll-house, and gave the rates of toll.

"It's Providence that has sent you here jest as I was bein' took out of the world," went on Uncle Jerry. "You're my only rel'tive. I'm leavin' you the three thousand I've accumulated. I want to leave you the job, too. I—"

A hoarse hail outside interrupted. The Cap'n, scowling, shuffled out and came in, jingling some pennies in his brown hand.

"I feel like a hand-organ monkey every time I go out there," he muttered.

"I tell ye," protested the old man, as earnestly as his feebleness would permit, "there's lots of big business in this world that don't need so long a head as this one does—bein' as how you're goin' to run it shipshape. You need brains; that you do, nephy. It'll keep you studyin' all the time. When you git interested in it you ain't never goin' to have time to be lonesome. There's the plain hello folks to be treated one way, the good-day folks, the pass-the-time-o'-day folks, the folks that need the tip o' the hat—jest for politeness, and not because you're beneath 'em," he hastened to add, noting the skipper's scowl; "the folks that swing up to the platform, the folks that you've got to chase a little, even if it is muddy; the folks that pay in advance and want you to remember it and save 'em trouble, the folks that pay when they come back, and the folks that never pay at all—and I tell ye, nephy, there's where your work is cut out for ye! I've only had one arm, but there's mighty few that have ever done me out of toll, and I'm goin' to give ye a tip on the old bell-wether of 'em all. I'm goin' to advise ye to stand to one side and let him pass. He's—"

"And me a man that's licked every—"

"Hold on! He's diff'runt from all you've ever tackled."

In his excitement the old toll-gatherer attempted to struggle upon his elbow. He choked. The nurse came and laid him back with gentle remonstrance. Before he had regained his voice to talk more the minister came, obeying a summons of grave import. Then came One who sealed One-arm Jerry's lips and quieted the fingers that had been picking at the faded coverlet as though they were gathering pennies.

And a day later, half sullenly, the Cap'n accepted the proposition of the directors of the bridge company, who had said some very flattering things to him about the reliability of the Sproul family. He reflected that he was far enough from tide-water to avoid the mariners who had known him in his former state. "I'll dock and repair riggin'," he pondered. "It's a come-down, but I'll clear and cruise again when the notion strikes me."

His possessions came promptly by express—his sea-chest, two parrots, and a most amazing collection of curios that fairly transformed the little cottage where the skipper, with seaman's facility in housekeeping, set up bachelor's hall.

He grudgingly allowed to himself that he was going to like it. The sun beamed blandly warm on the little bench before the toll-house. His rheumatism felt better. People commented admiringly on such of the curios as were displayed in the windows of the cottage. And when the parrots—"Port" and "Starboard"—ripped out such remarks as "Ahoy!" "Heave to!" "Down hellum!" and larded the conversation with horrible oaths, the wayfarers professed to see great humor in the performance.

In a little while the parrots would squall as soon as a traveller appeared at the brow of the river hill or poked out from the dim depths of the covered bridge. Even when the Cap'n was busy in his little kitchen he never failed to receive due notice of the approach of persons either in wagons or on foot.

"It will be a good man who runs toll on this bridge," he mused one day, as he poked dainties between the bars of the parrots' cages. "The old 'un was a good man in his day, like all the Sprouls. He didn't have but one arm, but there wa'n't many that ever come it over him. I've been thinkin' about one that did, and that he was scart of. If there was ever a man that scart him, and kept him scart till the day he died, then I'd like to see that same. It will be for me to show him that the nephy has some accounts of the poor old uncle to square."

Up the slope where the road to Smyrna Bridge wound behind the willows there was the growing rattle of wheels. The Cap'n cocked his head. His seaman's instinct detected something stormy in that impetuous approach. He fixed his gaze on the bend of the road.

Into sight came tearing a tall, gaunt horse, dragging a wagon equally tall and gaunt. The horse was galloping, and a tall man in the wagon stood up and began to crack a great whip, with reports like a pistol fusillade.

Cap'n Sproul took three defiant steps into the middle of the road, and then took one big step back—a stride that made his "rheumatiz speak up," but a stride that carried him safely to his platform. The team roared past. The big whip swished over his head, and the snapper barked in his ear. He got one fleeting glimpse at the man who was driving—a man with a face as hard as a pine knot. His lips were rolled away from his yellow teeth in a grimace that was partly a grin, partly a sneer. A queer, tall, pointed cap with a knob on its top was perched on his head like a candle-snuffer on a taper. With a shrill yell and more crackings of his whip he disappeared into the gloomy mouth of the covered bridge, and the roaring echoes followed him.

The skipper stood looking first at the mouth of the bridge and then at the sign above it that warned:

"As I was jest sayin'," he muttered, as the noise of the wheels died away, "I should like to see that man—and I reckon as how I have."

He sat down under the woodbine that wreathed the little porch and slowly filled his pipe, his gaze still on the bridge opening. As he crooked his leg and dragged the match across the faded blue of his trousers he growled:

"I dunno who he is, nor where he's come from, nor where he's goin' to, nor when he expects to get back, but, as near as I can figger it, he owes me ten cents' toll and three dollars' fine-money, makin' a total of three ten, to be charged and collected, as I understand it."

When he had got his pipe to going, after some little gruntings, he pulled out a note-book and a stubby pencil and marked down the figures. At the head of the page he scrawled:

"That name 'll have to do till I git a better one," he mused, and then stood up to receive toll from a farmer who drove slowly out from the bridge, his elbows on his knees, his horse walking slouchily.

"If it ain't no great output to you, mister, to tell, do you happen to know who was the nub of that streak of wind and cuss-words that jest went past here?"

The farmer bored him strangely a moment with his little gimlet eyes, snorted out a laugh, clapped his reins, and started on.

"I heard ye was a joker!" he shouted back, his beard trailing over his shoulder as he turned his head.

"There ain't no joke to this!" roared the skipper. But the man kept on.

Another patron emerged from the bridge, digging from his trousers pocket.

"You spoke it, didn't ye?" demanded the skipper. "Chain lightnin' on wheels. Who is he?"

The man grinned amiably and appreciatively.

"Quite a hand to hector, ain't ye, toll-keeper? He was goin' so fast I didn't know him, neither." He drove on, though the Cap'n hobbled after him, shouting strong language, in which the parrots joined.

"You needn't try to make me think that there ain't nobody who don't know the Kun'l," was the retort the man flung over his shoulder.

"Nice and accommodatin' class of paternage that's passin'," growled the Cap'n, kicking an inoffensive chair as he came back to his platform. "They talk about him as though he was Lord Gull and ruler of the stars. Jest as though a man that had sailed deep water all his days knowed all the old land-pirut's 'round here!"

It was a pedestrian—Old Man Jordan, bound to the village with a few pats of butter in a bucket—that the skipper finally held up.

"Oh, sho!" said Old Man Jordan. "'Course ye know him. Every one does."

"I tell you I don't!" bawled the skipper.

"Why, yas you do."

"Say, look a-here, What's-your-name, I'm goin' to give ye ten seconds to tell me the name of that critter."

He made a clutch to one side, and then remembered with a flush that he was no longer in reach of a spike-rack.

"Why, that was Kun'l Gideon Ward," faltered Uncle Jordan, impressed at last by the Cap'n's fury. "I thought ye knew."

"Thought! Thought! Why, ye never thought in your life. You only thought you thought. I dunno no more who you mean by 'Kun'l Gideon Ward' than as though you said General Bill Beelzebub."

"Why, yas you do—"

"There you go again! Do you mean to stand here and tell me I'm a liar?"

The glare in the seaman's eyes was too fierce to be fronted.

"Kun'l Gideon Ward is—is—wall, he's Kun'l Gideon Ward."

Jordan backed away suddenly at the oath the Cap'n ripped out.

"He owns more timber land than any other man in the county. He hires more men than any one else. He ain't never been downed in a trade or a fight yet. He's got double teeth, upper and lower, all the way round, drinks kairosene in the winter 'cause it's more warmin' than rum, and—and—"

"Well, what's that got to do with his runnin' toll on this bridge?" demanded the Cap'n.

"Bridge piers hold up his logs, he says, and he ain't never goin' to pay toll till the bridgemen pay him for loss of time on logs. It's been what you might call a stand-off for a good many years. Best thing is to let him run toll. That's what your uncle thought. I reckoned you knew all about Kun'l Gid Ward. Why, everybody knows—"

"Say, you let up on that string right now and here," snorted the Cap'n.

Old Man Jordan trotted away.

While the skipper was still pondering on the matter of Colonel Ward—the meditation had lasted over into the next day—there was a roar on the bridge, and the subject of his reflections passed in a swirl of dust on his return trip. He was standing up in his wagon as before, and he saluted the indignant toll-man with a flick of his whip that started the dust from the latter's pea-jacket.

"He's been over to the home place to see his sister Jane," volunteered Uncle Jordan, again on his way to the village with eggs. "She ain't never got married, and he ain't never got married. Old Squire Ward left his whole property to the two of 'em, and the Kun'l ain't ever let it be divided. He runs the whole estate and domineers over her, and she don't dast to say her soul's her own. If I was Jane I'd have my half out and git married to some nice man, and git a little comfort out'n life. He don't give her none—don't let her have the handlin' of a cent of money. She's a turrible nice sort of woman. There's risin' a hundred thousand dollars in her share, if the truth was known, and there's been some pretty good men shine up around her a little, but the Kun'l has run 'em away with a picked stick."

"Has, hey?"

"There ain't no Jack the Giant-Killers in these parts," sighed Old Man Jordan, hooking his bucket upon his arm and shambling away.

For several days Cap'n Sproul was busy about the gable end of the bridge during his spare moments and hours, climbing up and down the ladder, and handling a rope and certain pulleys with sailor dexterity. All the time his grim jaw-muscles ridged his cheeks. When he had finished he had a rope running through pulleys from the big gate up over the gable of the bridge and to the porch of the toll-house.

"There," he muttered, with great satisfaction, "that's the first bear-trap I ever set, and it ain't no extra sort of job, but I reckon when old grizzly goes ag'inst it he'll cal'late that this 'ere is a toll-bridge."

Then came days of anxious waiting. Sometimes a teamster's shouts to his horses up around the willows sent the Cap'n hobbling to the end of the rope. An unusual rattling in the bridge put him at his post with his teeth set and his eyes gleaming.

One day a mild and placid little woman in dove-gray came walking from the bridge and handed over her penny. She eyed the skipper with interest, and cocked her head with the pert demureness of a sparrow while she studied the parrots who were waddling about their cages.

"I never heard a parrot talk, sir," she said. "I hear that yours talk. I should dearly love to hear them."

"Their language is mostly deep-water flavor," said the Cap'n, curtly, "and 'tain't flavored edsackly like vanilla ice-cream. There's more of the peppersass tang to it than ladies us'ly enjoys."

The little woman gave a chirrup at the birds, and, to the skipper's utter astonishment, both Port and Starboard chirruped back sociably. Port then remarked: "Pretty Polly!" Starboard chirruped a few cheery bars from "A Sailor's Wife a Sailor's Star Should Be." Then both parrots rapped their beaks genially against the bars of the cages and beamed on the lady with their little button eyes.

"Well, I swow!" ejaculated the Cap'n, rubbing his knurly forefinger under his nose, and glancing first at the parrots and then at the lady. "If that ain't as much of an astonisher as when the scuttle-butt danced a jig on the dog-vane! Them two us'ly cusses strangers, no matter what age or sect. They was learnt to do it." He gazed doubtfully at the birds, as though they might possibly be deteriorating in the effeminacies of shore life.

"I always was a great hand with pets of all kinds," said the lady, modestly. "Animals seem to take to me sort of naturally. I hear you have long followed the sea, Cap'n Sproul—I believe that's the name, Cap'n Sproul?"

"Sproul it is, ma'am—Aaron for fore-riggin'. Them as said I follered the sea was nearer than shore-folks us'ly be. Took my dunnage aboard at fourteen, master at twenty-four, keel-hauled by rheumatiz at fifty-six—wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that. I ain't stuck on a penny-flippin' job of this sort."

"I should think it would be very pleasant after all the storms and the tossings. And yet the sea—the sea, the glorious sea—has always had a great fascination for me—even though I've never seen it."

"Nev—nev—never seen salt water!" This amazedly.

"Never." This sadly. "I've been kept—I've stayed very closely at my home. Being a single lady, I've had no one to talk to me or take me about. I have read books about the ocean, but I've never had any chance to hear a real and truly mariner tell about the wonderful waste of waters and describe foreign countries. I suppose you have been 'way, 'way out to sea, Cap'n Sproul—across the ocean, I mean."

She had timidly edged up and taken one of the chairs on the porch, gazing about her at the curios.

"Well, ma'am," remarked the Cap'n, dryly, as he seated himself in another chair, "I've waded across a cove wunst or twice at low water."

"I should love so to hear a mariner talk of his adventures. I have never had much chance to talk with any man—I mean any sailor. I have been kept—I mean I have stayed very closely at home all my life."

"It broadens a man, it sartain does, to travel," said the skipper, furtively slipping a sliver of tobacco into his cheek and clearing his throat preparatory to yarning a bit. The frank admiration and trustful innocence in the eyes of the pretty woman touched him.

"I suppose you have been out at sea in some awful storms, Cap'n. I often think of the sailormen at sea when the snow beats against the window and the winds howl around the corner."

"The wu'st blow I ever remember," began the skipper, leaning back and hooking his brown hands behind his head like a basket, "was my second trip to Bonis Airis—general cargo out, to fetch back hides. It was that trip we found the shark that had starved to death, and that was a story that was worth speakin' of. It—"

There was a hoarse bellow of "Giddap!" up behind the willows. Then into sight came galloping the tall, gaunt horse of Colonel Gideon Ward. The Colonel stood up, smacking his whip.

With one leap the Cap'n was at his rope, and began to haul in hand over hand.

The big gate at the mouth of the bridge squalled on its rusty hinges.

"You mustn't shut that gate—you mustn't!" shrieked the little woman. She ran and clutched at his sturdy arms. "That's my brother that's coming! You'll break his neck!"

The gate was already half shut, and the doughty skipper kept on pulling at the rope.

"Can't help it, ma'am, if it's the apostle Paul," he gritted. "There ain't nobody goin' to run toll on this bridge."

"It will kill him."

"It's him that's lickin' that hoss. 'Tain't me."

"It's my brother, I tell you!" She tried to drag the rope out of his hands, but he shook her off, pulled the big gate shut, set his teeth, clung to the rope, and waited.

The rush down the hill had been so impetuous and the horse was now running so madly under the whip that there was no such thing as checking him. With a crash of splintering wood he drove breast-on against the gate, throwing up his bony head at the end of his scraggy neck. At the crash the woman screamed and covered her eyes. But the outfit was too much of a catapult to be stopped. Through the gate it went, and the wagon roared away through the bridge, the driver yelling oaths behind him.

Cap'n Aaron Sproul walked out and strolled among the scattered debris, kicking it gloomily to right and left. The woman followed him.

"It was awful," she half sobbed.

"So you're Miss Jane Ward, be ye?" he growled, glancing at her from under his knotted eyebrows. "Speakin' of your pets, I should reckon that 'ere brother of yourn wa'n't one that you had tamed down fit to be turned loose. But you tell him for me, the next time you see him, that I'll plug the end of that bridge against him if it takes ev'ry dum cent of the prop'ty I'm wuth—and that's thutty thousand dollars, if it's a cent. I ain't none of your two-cent chaps!" he roared, visiting his wrath vicariously on her as a representative of the family. "I've got money of my own. Your brother seems to have made door-mats out'n most of the folks round here, but I'll tell ye that he's wiped his feet on me for the last time. You tell him that, dum him!"

Her face was white, and her eyes were shining as she looked at him.

"Gideon has always had his own way, Cap'n Sproul," she faltered. "I hope you won't feel too bitter against him. It would be awful—he so headstrong—and you so—so—brave!" She choked this last out, unclasping her hands.

"Well, I ain't no coward, and I never was," blurted the Cap'n.

"It's the bravest man that overcomes himself," she said. "Now, you have good judgment, Cap'n. My brother is hot-headed. Every one knows that you are a brave man. You can afford to let him go over the bridge without—"

"Never!" the skipper howled, in his best sea tones. "You're the last woman to coax and beg for him, if half what they tell me is true. He has abused you wuss'n he has any one else. If you and the rest ain't got any spunk, I have. You'll be one brother out if he comes slam-bangin' this way ag'in."

She looked at him appealingly for a moment, then tiptoed over the fragments of the gate, and hurried away through the bridge.

"You ain't no iron-clad, Kun'l Ward," muttered Sproul. "I'll hold ye next time."

He set to work on the river-bank that afternoon, cutting saplings, trusting to the squall of the faithful parrots to signal the approach of passers.

But the next day, when he was nailing the saplings to make a truly Brobdingnagian grid, one of the directors of the bridge company appeared to him.

"We're not giving you license to let any one run toll on this bridge, you understand," said the director, "but this fighting Colonel Ward with our property is another matter. It's like fighting a bear with your fists. And even if you killed the bear, the hide wouldn't be worth the damage. He has got too many ways of hurting us, Cap'n. He has always had his own way in these parts, and he probably always will. Let him go. We won't get the toll, nor the fines, but we'll have our bridge left."

"I was thinking of resigning this job," returned the Cap'n; "it was not stirrin' enough for a seafarin' man; but I'm sort of gittin' int'rested. How much will ye take for your bridge?"

But the director curtly refused to sell.

"All right, then," said the skipper, chocking his axe viciously into a sapling birch and leaving it there, "I'll fill away on another tack."

For the next two weeks, as though to exult in his victory, the Colonel made many trips past the toll-house.

He hurled much violent language at the Cap'n. The Cap'n, reinforced with his vociferous parrots, returned the language with great enthusiasm and volubility.

Then came the day once more when the little woman sat down in a chair in the shade of the woodbine.

"I took the first chance, Cap'n, while my brother has gone up-country, to come to tell you how much I appreciate your generous way of doing what I asked of you. You are the first man that ever put away selfish pride and did just what I asked."

The seaman started to repudiate vigorously, but looked into her brimming eyes a moment, choked, and was silent.

"Yes, sir, you're what I call noble, not to pay any attention to the boasts my brother is making of how he has backed you down."

"He is, is he?" The Cap'n rolled up his lip and growled.

"But I know just how brave you are, to put down all your anger at the word of a poor woman. And a true gentleman, too. There are only a few real gentlemen in the world, after all."

The Cap'n slid his thumb into the armhole of his waistcoat and swelled his chest out a little.

"There was no man ever come it over me, and some good ones have tried it, ma'am. So fur as women goes, I ain't never been married, but I reckon I know what politeness to a lady means."

She smiled at him brightly, and with such earnest admiration that he felt a flush crawling up from under his collar. He blinked at her and looked away. Starboard, with an embarrassing aptness that is sometimes displayed by children, whistled a few bars of "A Sailor's Wife a Sailor's Star Should Be."

"I don't mind owning up to you that my brother has imposed upon me in a great many ways," said the little lady, her eyes flashing. "I have endured a good deal from him because he is my brother. I know just how you feel about him, Cap'n, and that's why it makes me feel that we have a—a sort of what you might call common interest. I don't know why I'm talking so frankly with you, who are almost a stranger, but I've been—I have always lacked friends so much, that now I can't seem to help it. You truly do seem like an old friend, you have been so willing to do what I asked of you, after you had time to think it over."

The Cap'n was now congratulating himself that he hadn't blurted out anything about the bridge director and that sapling fence. It certainly was a grateful sound—that praise from the pretty lady! He didn't want to interrupt it.

"Now will you go on with that story of the storm?" she begged, hitching the chair a bit nearer. "I want to hear about your adventures."

She had all the instincts of Desdemona, did that pretty little lady. Three times that week she came to the toll-house and listened with lips apart and eyes shining. Cap'n Sproul had never heard of Othello and his wooing, but after a time his heart began to glow under the reverent regard she bent on him. Never did mutual selection more naturally come about. She loved him for the perils he had braved, and he—robbed of his mistress, the sea—yearned for just such companionship as she was giving him. He had known that life lacked something. This was it.

And when one day, after a stuttering preamble that lasted a full half hour, he finally blurted out his heart-hankering, she wept a little while on his shoulder—it being luckily a time when there was no one passing—and then sobbingly declared it could never be.

"'Fraid of your brother, hey?" he inquired.

She bumped her forehead gently on his shoulder in nod of assent.

"I reckon ye like me?"

"Oh, Aaron!" It was a volume of rebuke, appeal, and affection in two words.

"Then there ain't nothin' more to say, little woman. You ain't never had any one to look out for your int'rests in this life. After this, it's me that does it. I don't want your money. I've got plenty of my own. But your interests bein' my interests after this, you hand ev'rything over to me, and I'll put a twist in the tail of that Bengal tiger in your fam'ly that 'll last him all his life."

At the end of a long talk he sent her away with a pat on her shoulder and a cheery word in her ear.

It was Old Man Jordan who, a week or so later, on his way to the village with butter in his bucket, stood in the middle of the road and tossed his arms so frenziedly that Colonel Ward, gathering up his speed behind the willows, pulled up with an oath.

"Ye're jest gittin' back from up-country, ain't ye?" asked Uncle Jordan.

"What do you mean, you old fool, by stoppin' me when I'm busy? What be ye, gittin' items for newspapers?"

"No, Kun'l Ward, but I've got some news that I thought ye might like to hear before ye went past the toll-house this time. Intentions between Cap'n Aaron Sproul and Miss Jane Ward has been published."

"Wha-a-at!"

"They were married yistiddy."

"Wha—" The cry broke into inarticulateness.

"The Cap'n ain't goin' to be toll-man after to-day. Says he's goin' to live on the home place with his wife. There!" Uncle Jordan stepped to one side just in time, for the gaunt horse sprung under the lash as though he had the wings of Pegasus.

The Cap'n was sitting in front of the toll-house. The tall horse galloped down the hill, but the Colonel stood up, and, with elbows akimbo and hands under his chin, yanked the animal to a standstill, his splay feet skating through the highway dust. The Colonel leaped over the wheel and reversed his heavy whip-butt. The Cap'n stood up, gripping a stout cudgel that he had been whittling at for many hours.

While the new arrival was choking with an awful word that he was trying his best to work out of his throat, the Cap'n pulled his little note-book out of his pocket and slowly drawled:

"I reckoned as how ye might find time to stop some day, and I've got your account all figgered. You owe thirteen tolls at ten cents each, one thutty, and thirteen times three dollars fine—the whole amountin' to jest forty dollars and thutty cents. Then there's a gate to—"

"I'm goin' to kill you right in your tracks where you stand!" bellowed the Colonel.

The Cap'n didn't wait for the attack. He leaped down off his porch, and advanced with the fierce intrepidity of a sea tyrant.

"You'll pay that toll bill," he gritted, "if I have to pick it out of your pockets whilst the coroner is settin' on your remains."

The bully of the countryside quailed.

"You've stole my sister!" he screamed. "This ain't about toll I'm talkin'. You've been and robbed me of my sister!"

"Do you want to hear a word on that?" demanded the Cap'n, grimly. He came close up, whirling the cudgel. "You're an old, cheap, ploughed-land blowhard, that's what you are! You've cuffed 'round hired men and abused weak wimmen-folks. I knowed you was a coward when I got that line on ye. You don't dast to stand up to a man like me. I'll split your head for a cent." He kept advancing step by step, his mien absolutely demoniac. "I've married your sister because she wanted me. Now I'm goin' to take care of her. I've got thutty thousand dollars of my own, and she's giv' me power of attorney over hers. I'll take every cent of what belongs to her out of your business, and I know enough of the way that your business is tied up to know that I can crowd you right to the wall. Now do ye want to fight?"

The tyrant's face grew sickly white, for he realized all that threat meant.

"But there ain't no need of a fight in the fam'ly—and I want you to understand that I'm a pretty dum big part of the fam'ly after this. Be ye ready to listen to reason?"

"You're a robber!" gasped the Colonel, trying again to muster his anger.

"I've got a proposition to make so that there won't be no pull-haulin' and lawyers to pay, and all that."

"What is it?"

"Pardnership between you and me—equal pardners. I've been lookin' for jest this chance to go into business."

The Colonel leaped up, and began to stamp round his wagon.

"No, sir," he howled at each stamp. "I'll go to the poor-farm first."

"Shouldn't wonder if I could put you there," calmly rejoined the Cap'n. "These forced lickidations to settle estates is something awful when the books ain't been kept any better'n yours. I shouldn't be a mite surprised to find that the law would get a nab on you for cheatin' your poor sister."

Again the Colonel's face grew white.

"All is," continued the Cap'n, patronizingly, "if we can keep it all in the fam'ly, nice and quiet, you ain't goin' to git showed up. Now, I ain't goin' to listen to no more abuse out of you. I'll give you jest one minute to decide. Look me in the eye. I mean business."

"You've got me where I'll have to," wailed the Colonel.

"Is it pardnership?"

"Yas!" He barked the word.

"Now, Colonel Ward, there's only one way for you and me to do bus'ness the rest of our lives, and that's on the square, cent for cent. We might as well settle that p'int now. Fix up that toll bill, or it's all off. I won't go into business with a man that don't pay his honest debts."

He came forward with his hand out.

The Colonel paid.

"Now," said the Cap'n, "seein' that the new man is here, ready to take holt, and the books are all square, I'll ride home with you. I've been callin' it home now for a couple of days."

The new man at the toll-house heard the Cap'n talking serenely as they drove away.

"I didn't have any idee, Colonel, I was goin' to like it so well on shore as I do. Of course, you meet some pleasant and some unpleasant people, but that sister of yours is sartinly the finest woman that ever trod shoe-leather, and it was Providunce a-speakin' to me when she—"

The team passed away into the gloomy mouth of the Smyrna bridge.

Once on a time when the Wixon boy put Paris-green in the Trufants' well, because the oldest Trufant girl had given him the mitten, Marm Gossip gabbled in Smyrna until flecks of foam gathered in the corners of her mouth.

But when Cap'n Aaron Sproul, late of the deep sea, so promptly, so masterfully married Col. Gideon Ward's sister—after the irascible Colonel had driven every other suitor away from that patient lady—and then gave the Colonel his "everlasting comeuppance," and settled down in Smyrna as boss of the Ward household, that event nearly wore Gossip's tongue into ribbons.

"I see'd it from a distance—the part that happened in front of the toll-house," said Old Man Jordan. "Now, all of ye know that Kun'l Gid most gin'ly cal'lates to eat up folks that says 'Boo' to him, and pick his teeth with slivers of their bones. But talk about your r'yal Peeruvian ragin' lions—of wherever they come from—why, that Cap'n Sproul could back a 'Rabian caterwouser right off'm Caterwouser Township! I couldn't hear what was said, but I see Kun'l Gid, hoss-gad and all, backed right up into his own wagon; and Cap'n Sproul got in, and took the reins away from him as if he'd been a pindlin' ten-year-old, and drove off toward the Ward home place. And that Cap'n don't seem savage, nuther."

"Wal, near's I can find out," said Odbar Broadway from behind his counter, where he was counting eggs out of Old Man Jordan's bucket, "the Cap'n had a club in one hand and power of attorney from Kun'l Gid's sister in the other—and a threat to divide the Ward estate. The way Gid's bus'ness is tied up jest at present would put a knot into the tail of 'most any kind of a temper."

"I'm told the Cap'n is makin' her a turrible nice husband," observed one of the store loungers.

Broadway folded his specs into their case and came from behind the counter.

"Bein' a bus'ness man myself," he said, "I come pretty nigh knowin' what I'm talkin' about. Kun'l Gid Ward can never flout and jeer that the man that has married his sister was nothin' but a prop'ty-hunter. I'm knowin' to it that Cap'n Sproul has got thutty thousand in vessel prop'ty of his own, 'sides what his own uncle Jerry here left to him. Gid Ward has trompled round this town for twenty-five years, and bossed and browbeat and cussed, and got the best end of every trade. If there's some one come along that can put the wickin' to him in good shape, I swow if this town don't owe him a vote of thanks."

"There's a movement on already to ask Cap'n Sproul to take the office of first s'lec'man at the March meetin'," said one of the loafers.

"I sha'n't begretch him one mite of his popularity," vowed the storekeeper. "Any man that can put Kun'l Gid Ward where he belongs is a better thing for the town than a new meetin'-house would be."

But during all this flurry of gossip Cap'n Aaron Sproul spent his bland and blissful days up under the shade of the big maple in the Ward dooryard, smoking his pipe, and gazing out over the expanse of meadow and woodland stretching away to the horizon.

Most of the time his wife was at his elbow, peering with a species of adoration into his browned countenance as he related his tales of the sea. She constantly carried a little blank-book, its ribbon looped about her neck, and made copious entries as he talked. She had conceived the fond ambition of writing the story of his life. On the cover was inscribed, in her best hand:

"I reckon that Providunce put her finger on my compass when I steered this way. Louada Murilla," said the Cap'n one day, pausing to relight his pipe.

He had insisted on renaming his wife "Louada Murilla," and she had patiently accepted the new name with the resignation of her patient nature. But the name pleased her after her beloved lord had explained.

"I was saving that name for the handsomest clipper-ship that money could build," he said. "But when I married you, little woman, I got something better than a clipper-ship; and when you know sailorman's natur' better, you'll know what that compliment means. Yes, Providunce sent me here," continued the Cap'n, poking down his tobacco with broad thumb. "There I was, swashin' from Hackenny to t'other place, livin' on lobscouse and hoss-meat; and here you was, pinin' away for some one to love you and to talk to you about something sensibler than dropped stitches and croshayed lamp-mats. Near's I can find out about your 'sociates round here, you would have got more real sense out of talkin' with Port and Starboard up there," he added, pointing to his pet parrots, which had followed him in his wanderings. "We was both of us hankerin' for a companion—I mean a married companion. And I reckon that two more suiteder persons never started down the shady side—holt of hands, hey?"

He caught her hands and pulled her near him, and she bent down and kissed his weather-beaten forehead.

At that instant Col. Gideon Ward came clattering into the yard in his tall wagon. He glared at this scene of conjugal affection, and then lashed his horse savagely and disappeared in the direction of the barn.

"I read once about a skelington at a feast that rattled his dry bones every time folks there started in to enjoy themselves," said the Cap'n, after he watched the scowling Colonel out of sight. "For the last two weeks, Louada Murilla, it don't seem as if I've smacked you or you've smacked me but when I've jibed my head I've seen that ga'nt brother-in-law o' mine standing off to one side sourer'n a home-made cucumber pickle."

"It's aggravatin' for you, I know it is," she faltered. "But I've been thinkin' that perhaps he'd get more reconciled as the time goes on."

"Reconciled?" snapped the Cap'n, a little of the pepper in his nature coming to the surface. "If it was any one but you little woman, that talked about me as though I was death or an amputated leg in this family, I'd get hot under the collar. But I tell ye, we ain't got many years left to love each other in. We started pritty late. We can't afford to waste any time. And we can't afford to have the edge taken off by that Chinese image standin' around and makin' faces. I've been thinkin' of tellin' him so. But the trouble is with me that when I git to arguin' with a man I'm apt to forgit that I ain't on shipboard and talkin' to a tar-heel."

He surveyed his brown fists with a certain apprehensiveness, as though they were dangerous parties over whom he had no control.

"I should dretfully hate to have anything come up between you and Gideon, Cap'n," she faltered, a frightened look in her brown eyes. "It wouldn't settle anything to have trouble. But you've been about so much and seen human nature so much that it seems as though you could handle him different than with—with—"

"Poundin' him, eh?" Smiles broke over the skipper's face. "See how I'm softened, little woman!" he cried. "Time was when I would have chased a man that made faces at me as he done just now, and I'd have pegged him into the ground. But love has done a lot for me in makin' me decent. If I keep on, I'll forgit I've got two fists—and that's something for a shipmaster to say, now, I'll tell ye! A man has got to git into love himself to know how it feels."

Sudden reflection illuminated his face.

"Ain't old pickalilly—that brother of yourn—ever been in love?" he asked.

"Why—why," she stammered, "he's been in—well, sometimes now I think perhaps it ain't love, knowin' what I do now—but he's been engaged to Pharlina Pike goin' on fifteen years. And he's been showin' her attentions longer'n that. But since I've met you and found out how folks don't usually wait so long if they—they're in love—well, I've—"

"Fifteen years!" he snorted. "What is he waitin' for—for her to grow up?"

"Land sakes, no! She's about as old as he is. She's old Seth Pike's daughter, and since Seth died she has run the Pike farm with hired help, and has done real well at it. Long engagements ain't thought strange of 'round here. Why, there's—"

"Fifteen years!" he repeated. "That's longer'n old Methus'lum courted."

"But Gideon has been so busy and away from home so much in the woods, and Pharlina ain't been in no great pucker, seein' that the farm was gettin' on well, and—"

"There ain't no excuse for him," broke in the Cap'n, with vigor. He was greatly interested in this new discovery. His eyes gleamed. "'Tain't usin' her right. She can't step up to him and set the day. 'Tain't woman's sp'ere, that ain't. I didn't ask you to set the day. I set it myself. I told you to be ready."

Her cheek flushed prettily at the remembrance of that impetuous courtship, when even her dread of her ogre brother had been overborne by the Cap'n's masterful manner, once she had confessed her love.

"I know what love is myself," went on the Cap'n. "He don't know; that's what the trouble is with him. He ain't been waked up. Let him be waked up good and plenty, and he won't be standin' around makin' faces at us. I see what's got to be done to make a happy home of this. You leave it to me."

They saw the Colonel stamping in their direction from the barn.

"You run into the house, Louada Murilla," directed the Cap'n, "and leave me have a word with him."

The Colonel was evidently as anxious as the Cap'n for a word.

"Say, Sproul," he gritted, as he came under the tree, "I've got an offer for the stumpage on township number eight. Seein' that you're in equal partners with me on my sister's money," he sneered, "I reckon I've got to give ye figures and prices, and ask for a permit to run my own business."

"Seems 'most as if you don't enj'y talkin' business with me," observed the Cap'n, with a meek wistfulness that was peculiarly aggravating to his grouchy partner.

"I'd about as soon eat pizen!" stormed the other.

"Then let's not do it jest now," the Cap'n returned, sweetly. "I've got something more important to talk about than stumpage. Money and business ain't much in this world, after all, when you come to know there's something diff'runt. Love is what I'm referrin' to. Word has jest come to me that you're in love, too, the same as I am."

The gaunt Colonel glared malevolently down on the sturdy figure sprawling in the garden chair. The Cap'n's pipe clouds curled about his head, and his hands were stuffed comfortably into his trousers pockets. His face beamed.

"Some might think to hear you talk that you was a soft old fool that had gone love-cracked 'cause a woman jest as soft as you be has showed you some attention," choked the Colonel. "But I know what you're hidin' under your innocent-Abigail style. I know you're a jill-poke."

"A what?" blandly asked Sproul.

"That's woods talk for the log that makes the most trouble on the drive—and it's a mighty ornery word."

"Er—something like 'the stabboard pi-oogle,' which same is a seafarin' term, and is worse," replied the Cap'n, with bland interest in this philological comparison. "But let's not git strayed off'm the subject. Your sister, Louada Murilla—"

The gaunt man clacked his bony fists together in ecstasy of rage.

"She was christened Sarah Jane, and that's her name. Don't ye insult the father and mother that gave it to her by tackin' on another. I've told ye so once; I tell ye so—"

"Louada Murilla," went on the Cap'n, taking his huge fists out of his pockets and cocking them on his knees, not belligerently, but in a mildly precautionary way, "told me that you had been engaged to a woman named Phar—Phar—"

"Oh, give her any name to suit ye!" snarled the Colonel. "That's what ye're doin' with wimmen round here."

"You know who I mean," pursued Sproul, complacently, "seein' that you've had fifteen years to study on her name. Now, bein' as I'm one of the fam'ly, I'm going to ask you what ye're lally-gaggin' along for? Wimmen don't like to be on the chips so long. I am speakin' to you like a man and a brother when I say that married life is what the poet says it is. It's—"

"I've stood a good deal from you up to now!" roared Ward, coming close and leaning over threateningly. "You come here to town with so much tar on ye that your feet stuck every time you stood still in one place; you married my sister like you'd ketch a woodchuck; you've stuck your fingers into my business in her name—but that's jest about as fur as you can go with me. There was only one man ever tried to advise me about gitting married—and he's still a cripple. There was no man ever tried to recite love poetry to me. You take fair warnin'."

"Then you ain't willin' to listen to my experience, considerin' that I've been a worse hard-shell than you ever was in marriage matters, and now see the errors of my ways?" The Cap'n was blinking up wistfully.

"It means that I take ye by your heels and snap your head off," rasped Ward, tucking his sleeves away from his corded wrists. "You ain't got your club with you this time."

The Cap'n sighed resignedly.

"Now," went on the Colonel, with the vigorous decision of a man who feels that he has got the ascendency, "you talk about something that amounts to something. That stumpage on number eight is mostly cedar and hackmatack, and I've got an offer from the folks that want sleepers for the railroad extension."

He went on with facts and figures, but the Cap'n listened with only languid interest. He kept sighing and wrinkling his brows, as though in deep rumination on a matter far removed from the stumpage question. When the agreement of sale was laid before him he signed with a blunted lead-pencil, still in his trance.

"Northin' but a cross-cut saw with two axe-handles for legs," he said to himself, his eyes on the Colonel's back as that individual stamped wrathfully away. "Teeth and edge are hard as iron! It's no good to talk mattermony to him. Prob'ly it wouldn't do no good for me to talk mattermony to Phar—Phar—to t'other one. She couldn't ask him to go git a minister. 'Tain't right to put that much onto a woman's shoulders. The trouble with him is that he's too sure of wimmen. Had his sister under his thumb all them years, and thought less and less of her for stayin' there. He's too sure of t'other. Thinks nobody else wants her. Thinks all he's got to do is step round and git her some day. Ain't got no high idee of wimmen like I have. Thinks they ought to wait patient as a tree in a wood-lot. Has had things too much his own way, I say. Hain't never had his lesson. Thinks nobody else don't want her, hey? And she can wait his motions! He needs his lesson. Lemme see!"

With his knurly forefinger at his puckered forehead he sat and pondered.

He was very silent at supper.

The Colonel, still exulting in his apparent victory, said many sneering and savage things, and clattered his knife truculently on his plate. Sproul merely looked at him with that wistful preoccupation that still marked his countenance.

"He's a quitter," pondered the Colonel. "I reckon he ain't playin' lamb so's to tole me on. He's growed soft—that's what he's done."

Ward went to sleep that night planning retaliation.

Sproul stayed awake when the house was quiet, still pondering.

During the next few days, as one treads farther and farther out upon thin ice to test it, the Colonel craftily set about regaining, inch by inch, his lost throne as tyrant. Occasionally he checked himself in some alarm, to wonder what meant that ridging of the Cap'n's jaw-muscles, and whether he really heard the seaman's teeth gritting. Once, when he recoiled before an unusually demoniac glare from Sproul, the latter whined, after a violent inward struggle:

"It beats all how my rheumaticks has been talkin' up lately. I don't seem to have no ginger nor spirit left in me. I reckon I got away from the sea jest in time. I wouldn't even dare to order a nigger to swab decks, the way I'm feelin' now."

"You've allus made a good deal of talk about how many men you've handled in your day," said the Colonel, tucking a thumb under his suspender and leaning back with supercilious cock of his gray eyebrows. "It's bein' hinted round town here more or less that you're northin' but bluff. I don't realize, come to think it over, how I ever come to let you git such a holt in my fam'ly. I—"

The two were sitting, as was their custom in those days of the Colonel's espionage, under the big maple in the yard. A man who was passing in the highway paused and leaned on the fence.

"Can one of you gents tell me," he asked, "where such a lady as Miss Phar"—he consulted a folded paper that he held in his hand—"Pharleena Pike lives about here?"

He was an elderly man with a swollen nose, striated with purple veins. Under his arm he carried a bundle done up in meat-paper.

There was a queer glint of excitement in the eyes of the Cap'n. But he did not speak. He referred the matter to Ward with a jab of his thumb.

"What do you want to know where Miss Pike lives for?" demanded the Colonel, looking the stranger over with great disfavor.

"None of your business," replied the man of the swollen nose, promptly. "I've asked a gent's question of one I took to be a gent, and I'd like a gent's reply."

"You see," said Cap'n Sproul to the stranger, with a confidential air, as though he were proposing to impart the secret of the Colonel's acerbity, "Colonel Ward here is—"

"You go 'long two miles, swing at the drab school-house, and go to the second white house on the left-hand side of the road!" shouted Ward, hastily breaking in on the explanation. His thin cheeks flushed angrily. The man shuffled on.

"Why don't you print it on a play-card that I'm engaged to Pharlina Pike and hang it on the fence there?" the Colonel snorted, wrathfully, whirling on the Cap'n. "Didn't it ever occur to you that some things in this world ain't none of your business?"

The Cap'n sighed with the resigned air that he had been displaying during the week past.

"Lemme see, where was I?" went on the Colonel, surlily. "I was sayin', wasn't I, that I didn't see how I'd let you stick yourself into this fam'ly as you've done? It's time now for you and me to git to a reck'nin'. There's blamed liars round here snick'rin' in their whiskers, and sayin' that you've backed me down. Now—"

Another man was at the fence, and interrupted with aggravating disregard of the Colonel's intentness on the business in hand. This stranger was short and squat, stood with his feet braced wide apart, and had a canvas bag slung over his shoulder. His broad face wore a cheery smile.

"I've beat nor'west from the railroad, fetched a covered bridge on the port quarter, shipmates," he roared, jovially, "and here I be, bearin's lost and dead-reck'nin' skow-wowed."

"Seems to be your breed," sneered Ward to the Cap'n. "What's that he's sayin', put in human language?"

"I'm chartered for port—port"—he also referred to a folded paper—"to port Furliny Pike, som'eres in this latitude. Give me p'ints o' compass, will ye?"

Ward leaped to his feet and strode toward the fence, his long legs working like calipers.

"What do ye want of Pharline Pike?" he demanded, angrily.

"None of your business," replied the cheerful sailor. "If this is the way landlubbers take an honest man's hail, ye're all jest as bad as I've heard ye was."

"I'm a mind to cuff your ears," yapped the Colonel.

The other glanced up the angular height of his antagonist.

"Try it," he said, squaring his sturdy little figure. "Try it, and I'll climb your main riggin' and dance a jig on that dog-vane of a head of yourn."

This alacrity for combat clearly backed down Ward. In his rampageous life his tongue had usually served him better than his fists.

"Avast, shipmate!" called the Cap'n, in his best sea tones. The sailor beamed delighted recognition of marine masonry. "The fact of the matter is, my friend here has some claim—the truth is, he's—"

"You go 'long two miles, swing at the drab school-house, and then take the second house—white one—on the left-hand side of the road," bawled Ward, "and you go mighty quick!"

The sailor ducked acknowledgment and rolled away.

"If you'd unpinned that mouth of yourn fur enough to tell that tramp that I'm engaged to Pharline Pike," growled Ward, returning to the tree, "I'd 'a' broke in your head—and you might as well know it first as last."

"Ain't you engaged to her?"

"You know I be."

"Well, I've allus told the truth all my life—and I reckon I shall continner to tell it. If you're ashamed to have it knowed that you're engaged to Pharlina Pike, then it's time she heard so. I'd jest as soon tell her as not."

"I started to say to you," raged Ward, "that you'd stuck your finger into my pie altogether too deep. I ain't killed as many sailors as you're braggin' on, but there ain't no man ever licked Gid Ward, and—"

"Near's I can tell from what I hear about you," retorted the Cap'n, "built on racin' lines as you be, you've never let a man git near enough to lick ye."

Again the Colonel noted that red vengefulness in the skipper's eyes, and recoiled suspiciously.

"Oh, my rheumaticks!" the seaman hastened to moan.

Ward had his back to the fence.

"I cal'late as how there's another party that wants his bearin's," suggested Sproul.

A rather decayed-looking gentleman, wearing a frock-coat shiny at the elbows, and a fuzzy plug-hat, was tapping his cane against one of the pickets to attract attention.

"I am looking for the residence of Miss Pharlina Pike," he announced, with a precise puckering of his lips. "I'll thank you for a word of direction. But I want to say, as a lowly follower of the Lord—in evangelical lines—that it is not seemly for two men to quarrel in public."

Ward had been gaping at him in amazement.

"I can tell ye right now," he cried, "that Miss Pharline Pike ain't hirin' no farm-hand that wears a plug-hat! There ain't no need of your goin' to her place."

"My dear sir," smiled the decayed gentleman, "it is a delicate matter not to be canvassed in public; but I can assure you that I shall not remain with Miss Pike as a menial or a bond-servant. Oh no! Not by any means, sir!"

Ward scruffed his hand over his forehead, blinking with puzzled astonishment.

"I'll thank you for the directions," said the stranger. "They were not able to give me exact instructions at the village—at least, I cannot remember them."

"I ain't no dadfired guide-board to stand here all day and p'int the way to Pharline Pike's," roared Ward, with a heat that astonished the decayed gentleman.

"I don't want no elder to go away from this place and report that he wa'n't used respectful," said Sproul, meekly, addressing the stranger. "You'll have to excuse Colonel Ward here. P'r'aps I can say for him, as a pertickler friend, what it wouldn't be modest for him to say himself. The fact is, he's en—"

The infuriated Ward leaped up and down on the sward and shrieked the road instructions to the wayfarer, who hustled away, casting apprehensive glances over his shoulder.

But when the Colonel turned again on the Cap'n, the latter rose and hobbled with extravagant limpings toward the house.

"I don't reckon I can stay out here and pass talk with you, brother-in-law," he called back, reproachfully. "Strangers, passin' as they be, don't like to hear no such language as you're usin'. Jest think of what that elder said!"

Ward planted himself upon a garden chair, and gazed down the road in the direction in which the strangers had gone. He seemed to be thinking deeply, and the Cap'n watched him from behind one of the front-room curtains.

Two more men passed up the road. At the first, the Colonel flourished his arms and indulged in violent language, the gist of which the Cap'n did not catch. He ran to the fence when the second accosted him, tore off a picket, and flung it after the fleeing man.

Then he sat down and pondered more deeply still.

He cast occasional glances toward the house, and once or twice arose as though to come in. But he sat down and continued to gaze in the direction of Pharlina Pike's house.

It was late in the afternoon when a woman came hurrying down the slope through the maple-sugar grove. The Cap'n, at his curtain with his keen sea eye, saw her first. He had been expecting her arrival. He knew her in the distance for Pharlina Pike, and realized that she had come hot-foot across lots.

Sproul was under the big maple as soon as she.

"For mercy sakes, Colonel Gid," she gasped, "come over to my house as quick's you can!"

She had come up behind him, and he leaped out of his chair with a snap like a jack-in-the-box.

"There's somethin' on, and I knowed it!" he squalled. "What be them men peradin' past here to your house for, and tellin' me it ain't none of my business? You jest tell me, Pharline Pike, what you mean by triflin' in this way?"

"Lord knows what it's all about! I don't!" she quavered.

"You do know, too!" he yelled. "Don't ye try to pull wool over my eyes! You do know, too!"

"It's a turrible thing to be jealous," cooed Cap'n Sproul to his trembling little wife, who had followed at his heels.

"I don't know, either," wailed the spinster. "There's one of 'em in the settin'-room balancin' a plug-hat on his knees and sayin', 'Lo! the bridegroom cometh'; and there's two on the front steps kickin' the dog ev'ry time he comes at 'em; and there's one in the kitchen that smells o' tar, and has got a bagful of shells and sech things for presents to me; there's one in the barn lookin' over the stock—and I s'pose they're comin' down the chimbly and up the suller stairs by this time. You're the only one I've got in the world to depend on, Colonel Gid. For mercy sakes, come!"

"What do they say—what's their excuse?" he demanded, suspiciously.

"They say—they say," she wailed—"they say they want to marry me, but I don't know what they've all come hov'rin' round me for—honest to Moses I don't!" She folded her hands in her apron and wrung them. "I'm pretty nigh scart to death of 'em," she sobbed.

"I reckon you can give 'em an earful when you git down there," said the Cap'n, "when you tell 'em that you've been engaged to her for fifteen years. But it ain't none surprisin' that men that hear of that engagement should most natch'ally conclude that a woman would like to git married after a while. I cal'late ye see now, brother-in-law, that you ain't the only man that appreciates what a good woman Miss Pharlina Pike is."

"You come along, Pharline," said the Colonel, taking her arm, after he had bored the Cap'n for a moment with flaming eye. "I reckon I can pertect ye from all the tramps ever let loose out of jails—and—and when I git to the bottom of this I predict there'll be bloodshed—there'll be bones broke, anyway." With one more malevolent look at the Cap'n he started away.

"It's only a short cut through the maple growth, Louada Murilla," said Sproul. "My rheumaticks is a good deal better of a sudden. Let's you and me go along."

As they trudged he saw farmers at a distance here and there, and called to them to follow.

"Look here, I don't need no bee!" howled the Colonel. "This ain't nothing to spread broadcast in this community."

"Never can tell what's li'ble to happen," retorted Sproul. "Witnesses don't never hurt cases like this."

He continued to call the farmers, despite Ward's objurgations. Farmers called their wives. All followed behind the engaged couple. As usually happens in country communities, word had gone abroad in other directions that there were strange doings at the Pike place. With huge satisfaction the Cap'n noted that the yard was packed with spectators.

"Where be ye?" bellowed Colonel Ward, now in a frenzy. "Where be ye, ye scalawags that are round tryin' to hector a respectable woman that wouldn't wipe her feet on ye? Come out here and talk to me!"

The neighbors fell back, recognizing his authority in the matter; and the men who were suing this modern Penelope appeared from various parts of the premises.

"I desire to say, as a clergyman along evangelical lines, and not a settled pastor," said the man in the fuzzy plug-hat, "that I do not approve of this person's violent language. I have seen him once before to-day, and he appeared singularly vulgar and unrefined. He used violent language then. I desire to say to you, sir, that I am here on the best of authority"—he tapped his breast pocket—"and here I shall remain until I have discussed the main question thoroughly with the estimable woman who has invited me here."

"It's a lie—I never invited him, Colonel Gid!" cried the spinster. "If you're any part of a man, and mean any part of what you have allus said to me, you'll make him take that back."

For a moment the Colonel's jealous suspicion had flamed again, but the woman's appeal fired him in another direction.

"Look here, you men," he shouted, his gaze running over plug-hat, swollen nose, seaman's broad face, and the faces of the other suitors, "I'm Gideon Ward, of Smyrna, and I've been engaged to Miss Pharline Pike for fifteen years, and—"

"Then I don't blame her for changing her mind, ye bloody landlubber!" snorted the seaman, smacking his hand upon his folded paper.

"Being engaged signifies little in the courts of matrimony," said the decayed-looking man with dignity. "She has decided to choose another, and—"

Colonel Ward threw back his shoulders and faced them all with glittering eyes.

"I'd like to see the man that can step into this town and lug off the woman that's promised to me," he raved. "Engagements don't hold, hey? Then you come this way a week from to-day, and you'll see Gideon Ward and Pharline Pike married as tight as a parson can tie the knot. I mean it!" The excitement of the moment, his rage at interference in his affairs, his desire to triumph thus publicly over these strangers, had led him into the declaration.

The spinster gasped, but she came to him and trustfully put her hand on his arm.

"P'raps some can be put off by that bluff," said the man with the swollen nose, "but not me that has travelled. I'm here on business, and I've got the dockyments, and if there's any shenanigan, then some one's got to pay me my expenses, and for wear and tear." He waved a paper.

Ward leaped forward and snatched the paper from his grasp.

"It's about time for me to see what you're flourishing round here promiskous, like a bill o' sale of these primises," he snarled.

"You can read it, and read it out jest as loud as you want to," said the man, coming forward and putting a grimy finger on a paragraph displayed prominently on the folded sheet of newspaper.

The Colonel took one look and choked. An officious neighbor grabbed away the paper when Ward made a sign as though to tuck it into his pocket.

"I'll read it," said the neighbor. "Mebbe my eyesight is better'n yourn." Then he read, in shrill tones:

"Unmarried maiden lady, smart and good-looking, desires good husband. Has two-hundred-and-thirty-acre farm in good state of cultivation, well stocked, and will promise right party a home and much affection. Apply on premises to Pharlina Pike, Smyrna."

"I never—I never—dadrat the liar that ever wrote that!" screamed the spinster.

"You see for yourself," said the man of the swollen nose, ignoring her disclaimer. "We're here on business, and expect to be treated like business men—or expenses refunded to us."

But the Colonel roared wordlessly, like some angry animal, seized a pitchfork that was leaning against the side of the spinster's ell, and charged the group of suitors. His mien was too furious. They fled, and fled far and forever.

"There's some one," said Ward, returning into the yard and driving the fork-tines into the ground, "who has insulted Miss Pike. I'd give a thousand dollars to know who done that writin'."

Only bewildered stares met his furious gaze.

"I want you to understand," he went on, "that no one can drive me to git married till I'm ready. But I'm standin' here now and tellin' the nosy citizens of this place that I'm ready to be married, and so's she who is goin' to be my companion, and we'll 'tend to our own business in spite of the gossips of Smyrna. It's for this day week! I don't want no more lyin' gossip about it. You're gittin' it straight this time. It's for this day week; no invitations, no cards, no flowers, no one's durnation business. There, take that home and chaw on it. Pharline, let's you and me go into the house."

"I reckon there's witnesses enough to make that bindin'," muttered Cap'n Sproul under his breath.

He bent forward and tapped the Colonel on the arm as Ward was about to step upon the piazza.

"Who do ye suspect?" he whispered, hoarsely.

It was a perfectly lurid gaze that his brother-in-law turned on him.

What clutched Ward's arm was a grip like a vise. He glared into the Colonel's eyes with light fully as lurid as that which met his gaze. He spoke low, but his voice had the grating in it that is more ominous than vociferation.

"I thought I'd warn ye not to twit. My rheumaticks is a good deal better at this writin', and my mind ain't so much occupied by other matters as it has been for a week or so. When you come home don't talk northin' but business, jest as you natch'ally would to a brother-in-law and an equal pardner. That advice don't cost northin', but it's vallyble."

As Cap'n Sproul trudged home, his little wife's arm tucked snugly in the hook of his own, he observed, soulfully:

"Mattermony, Louada Murilla—mattermony, it is a blessed state that it does the heart good to see folks git into as ought to git into it. As the poet says—um-m-m, well, it's in that book on the settin'-room what-not. I'll read it to ye when we git home."

Cap'n Aaron Sproul was posted that bright afternoon on the end of his piazza. He sat bolt upright and twiddled his gnarled thumbs nervously. His wife came out and sat down beside him.

"Where you left off, Cap'n," she prompted meekly, "was when the black, whirling cloud was coming and you sent the men up-stairs—"

"Aloft!" snapped Cap'n Sproul.

"I mean aloft—and they were unfastening the sails off the ropes, and—"

"Don't talk of snuggin' a ship like you was takin' in a wash," roared the ship-master, in sudden and ungallant passion. It was the first impatient word she had received from him in that initial, cozy year of their marriage. Her mild brown eyes swam in tears as she looked at him wonderingly.

"I—I haven't ever seen a ship or the sea, but I'm trying so hard to learn, and I love so to hear you talk of the deep blue ocean. It was what first attracted me to you." Her tone was almost a whimper.

But her meekness only seemed to increase the Cap'n's impatience.

"You haven't seemed to be like your natural self for a week," she complained, wistfully. "You haven't seemed to relish telling me stories of the sea and your narrow escapes. You haven't even seemed to relish vittles and the scenery. Oh, haven't you been weaned from the sea yet, Aaron?"

Cap'n Sproul continued to regard his left foot with fierce gloom. He was giving it his undivided attention. It rested on a wooden "cricket," and was encased in a carpet slipper that contrasted strikingly with the congress boot that shod his other foot. Red roses and sprays of sickly green vine formed the pattern of the carpet slipper. The heart of a red rose on the toe had been cut out, as though the cankerworm had eaten it; and on a beragged projection that stuck through and exhaled the pungent odor of liniment, the Cap'n's lowering gaze was fixed.

"There's always somethin' to be thankful for," said his meek wife, her eyes following his gaze. "You've only sprained it, and didn't break it. Does it still ache, dear?"

"It aches like—of course it aches!" roared the Cap'n. "Don't ask that jeebasted, fool question ag'in. I don't mean to be tetchy, Louada Murilla," he went on, after a little pause, a bit of mildness in his tone, "but you've got to make allowance for the way I feel. The more I set and look at that toe the madder I git at myself. Oh, I hadn't ought to have kicked that cousin of yourn, that's what I hadn't!"

"You don't know how glad I am to hear you say that, Aaron," she cried, with fervor. "I was afraid you hadn't repented."

"I ought to 'a' hit him with a club and saved my toe, that's what I mean," he snorted, with grim viciousness.

She sighed, and he resumed his dismal survey of the liniment-soaked rags.

"Once when I was—" he resumed, in a low growl, after a time.

"Oh, I'm so glad you're goin' to tell a story, Cap'n," she chirped, welcoming his first return of good-nature since his mishap.

"There ain't no story to it," he snapped. "I only want to say that there's a place down in Africa where I put in with the Jefferson P. Benn one time, where they daub honey on folks that they want to git red of, and anchor 'em on an ant-bed. That's jest what's happenin' to me here in Smyrna, and my thutty thousand dollars that I've worked hard for and earnt and saved is the honey. You've lived among them here all your life, Louada Murilla, and I s'pose you've got more or less wonted to 'em. But if I hadn't squirmed and thrashed round a little durin' the time I've lived here, after marryin' you and settlin' down among 'em, they'd have et me, honey, money, hide, and hair. As it is, they've got their little lunch off'm me. I haven't thrashed round enough till—till yistiddy."

He wriggled the toe in the centre of the rose, and grunted.

"I was in hopes we wouldn't have any more trouble in the family, only what we've had with brother Gideon since we've been married," she said mildly. "Of course, Marengo Todd is only a second cousin of mine, but still, he's in the family, you know, and families hang together, 'cause blood—"

"Blood is what they want, blast 'em!" he bawled, angrily. "I've used Marengo Orango, there, or whatever you call him, all right, ain't I? I've let him do me! He knowed I was used to sea ways, and wa'n't used to land ways, and that he could do me. I lent him money, first off, because I liked you. And I've lent him money sence because I like a liar—and he's a good one! I've used all your relatives the best I've knowed how, and—and they've turned round and used me! But I've put a dot, full-stop, period to it—and I done it with that toe," he added, scowling at the pathetic heart of the red rose.

"I wish it hadn't been one of the family," she sighed.

"It couldn't well help bein' one," snarled the Cap'n. "They're about all named Todd or Ward round here but one, and his name is Todd Ward Brackett, and he's due next. And they're all tryin' to borry money off'm me and sell me spavined hosses. Now, let's see if they can take a hint." He tentatively wriggled the toe some more, and groaned. "The Todds and the Wards better keep away from me."

Then he suddenly pricked up his ears at the sound of the slow rumble of a wagon turning into the yard. The wagon halted, and they heard the buzzing twang of a jew's-harp, played vigorously.

"There's your Todd Ward Brackett. I predicted him! 'Round here to sell ye rotten thread and rusted tinware and his all-fired Balm o' Joy liniment."

"It's good liniment, and I need some more for your toe, Aaron," pleaded his wife, putting her worsted out of her lap.

"I'll chop that toe off and use it for cod bait before I'll cure it by buying any more liniment off'm him," the Cap'n retorted. "You jest keep your settin', Louada Murilla. I'll tend to your fam'ly end after this."

He struggled up and began to hop toward the end of the piazza. The new arrival had burst into cheery song:

      "There was old Hip Huff, who went by freight
        To Newry Corner, in this State.
        Packed him in a—"

There was a red van in the yard, its side bearing the legend:

A brisk, little, round-faced man sat on the high seat, bolt upright in the middle of it, carolling lustily. It was "Balm o' Joy" Brackett, pursuing his humble vocation and using his familiar method of attracting customers to their doors.

"Shet up that clack!" roared the Cap'n.

"Hillo, hullo, hallah, gallant Captain," chirped Brackett, imperturbable under the seaman's glare. "I trust that glory floods your soul and all the world seems gay." And he went on breathlessly:

"May ev'ry hour of your life seem like a pan of Jersey milk, and may you skim the cream off'm it. Let's be happy, let's be gay, trade with me when I come your way. Tinware shines like the new-ris' sun, twist, braid, needles beat by none; here's your values, cent by cent, and Balm o' Joy lin-i-ment. Trade with—"

"Git out o' this yard!" bawled the Cap'n, in his storm-and-tempest tones. "You crack-brained, rag-and-bone-land-pirate, git off'm my premises! I don't want your stuff. I've bought the last cent's wu'th of you I'll ever buy. Git out!"

"The Cap'n isn't well to-day, Todd," quavered Mrs. Sproul. Fear prompted her to keep still. But many years of confidential barter of rags for knicknacks had made Todd Brackett seem like "own folks," as she expressed it. "We won't trade any to-day," she added, apologetically.

"Nor we won't trade ever," bawled the Cap'n, poising himself on one foot like an angry hawk. "You go 'long out of this yard."

Without losing his smile—for he had been long accustomed to the taunts and tirades of dissatisfied housewives—the peddler backed his cart around and drove away, crying over his shoulder with great good-humor:

"A merry life and a jolly life is the life for you and me!"

"I'll make life merry for ye, if ye come into this yard ag'in, you whiffle-headed dog-vane, you!" the Cap'n squalled after him. But Brackett again struck up his roundelay:

      "There was old Hip Huff, who went by freight
        To Newry Corner, in this State.
        Put him in a crate to git him there,
        With a two-cent stamp to pay his fare.
            Rowl de fang-go—old Smith's mare."

The Cap'n hopped into the house and set his foot again on the cricket that his wife brought dutifully. He gritted his teeth as long as the voice of the singer came to his ears.

"I wish you hadn't," mourned his wife; "he's as good-meaning a man as there is in town, even if he is a little light-headed. He's always given me good trades, and his st'ilyards don't cheat on rags."

The old mariner was evidently preparing a stinging reply, but a knock on the door interrupted him. Louada Murilla admitted three men, who marched in solemnly, one behind the other, all beaming with great cordiality. Cap'n Sproul, not yet out of the doldrums, simply glowered and grunted as they took seats.

Then one of them, whom Sproul knew as Ludelphus Murray, the local blacksmith, arose and cleared his throat with ominous formality.

"It's best to hammer while the iron is hot, Cap'n," he said. "It won't take many clips o' the tongue to tell you what we've come for. We three here are a committee from the Smyrna Ancient and Honer'ble Firemen's Association to notify you that at a meetin' last ev'nin' you was unanimously elected a member of that organization, and—"

"Oh, Aaron!" cried Louada Murilla, ecstatically. "How glad I am this honor has been given to you! My own father belonged."

"And," continued Murray, with a satisfied smile, and throwing back his shoulders as one who brings great tidings, "it has been realized for a long time that there ain't been the discipline in the association that there ought to be. We have now among us in our midst one who has commanded men and understands how to command men; one who has sailed the ragin' deep in times of danger, and—and, well, a man that understands how to go ahead and take the lead in tittlish times. So the association"—he took a long breath—"has elected you foreman, and I hereby hand you notice of the same and the book of rules."

The Cap'n scowled and put his hand behind the rocking-chair in which he was seated.

"Not by a—" he began, but Murray went on with cheerful explanation.

"I want to say to you that this association is over a hundred years old, and our hand tub, the 'Hecla,' is ninety-seven years old, and has took more prizes squirtin' at musters than any other tub in the State. We ain't had many fires ever in Smyrna, but the Ancients take the leadin' rank in all social events, and our dances and banquets are patronized by the best."

"It's an awful big honor, Aaron," gasped his wife. She turned to the committee. "The Cap'n hasn't been feelin' well, gentlemen, and this honor has kind of overcome him. But I know he appreciates it. My own father was foreman once, and it's a wonderful thing to think that my husband is now."

"'Tain't likely that the Ancients will ever forgit them dinners we had here, Mis' Sproul," remarked one of the men, 'suffling' the moisture at the corners of his mouth.

"Seein' that you ain't well, we don't expect no speech, Cap'n," said Murray, laying the documents upon Sproul's knee. "I see that the honor has overcome you, as it nat'rally might any man. We will now take our leave with a very good-day, and wishin' you all of the best, yours truly, and so forth." He backed away, and the others rose.

"Pass through the kitchen, gentlemen," said Mrs. Sproul, eagerly. "I will set out a treat." They trudged that way with deep bows at the threshold to their newly drafted foreman, who still glared at them speechlessly.

When Mrs. Sproul returned at length, still fluttering in her excitement, he was reading the little pamphlet that had been left with him, a brick-red color slowly crawling up the back of his neck.

"Just think of it for an honor, Aaron," she stammered, "and you here in town only such a little while! Oh, I am so proud of you! Mr. Murray brought the things in his team and left them on the piazza. I'll run and get them."

She spread them on the sitting-room floor, kneeling before him like a priestess offering sacrifice. With his thumb in the pamphlet, he stared at the array.

There was a battered leather hat with a broad apron, or scoop, behind to protect the back. On a faded red shield above the visor was the word "Foreman." There were two equally battered leather buckets. There was a dented speaking-trumpet. These the Cap'n dismissed one by one with an impatient scowl. But he kicked at one object with his well foot.

"What's that infernal thing?" he demanded.

"A bed-wrench, Aaron. It's to take apart corded beds so as to get them out of houses that are on fire. There aren't hardly any corded beds now, of course, but it's a very old association that you're foreman of, and the members keep the old things. It's awfully nice to do so, I think. It's like keeping the furniture in old families. And that big bag there, with the puckerin'-string run around it, is the bag to put china and valuables into and lug away."

"And your idee of an honor, is it," he sneered, "is that I'm goin' to put that dingbusset with a leather back-fin onto my head and grab up them two leather swill-pails and stick that iron thing there under my arm and grab that puckering-string bag in my teeth and start tophet-te-larrup over this town a-chasin' fires? Say—" but his voice choked, and he began to read once more the pamphlet. The red on the back of his neck grew deeper.

At last the explosion occurred.

"Louada Murilla Sproul, do you mean to say that you've had this thing in your fam'ly once, and was knowin' what it meant, and then let them three Shanghaiers come in here and shove this bloodsucker bus'ness onto me, and git away all safe and sound? I had been thinkin' that your Todds and Wards was spreadin' some sail for villuns, but they're only moskeeters to Barb'ry pirates compared with this."

He cuffed his hand against the open pages of the pamphlet.

"It says here that the foreman has to set up a free dinner for 'em four times a year and ev'ry holiday. It says that the foreman is fined two dollars for ev'ry monthly meetin' that he misses, other members ten cents. He's fined ten dollars for ev'ry fire that he isn't at, other members a quarter of a dollar. He's fined one dollar for ev'ry time he's ketched without his hat, buckets, bag, and bed-wrench hung in his front hall where they belong, other members ten cents. And he's taxed a quarter of the whole expenses of gittin' to firemen's muster and back. Talk about lettin' blood with a gimlet! Why, they're after me with a pod-auger!"

All the afternoon he read the little book, cuffed it, and cursed. He snapped up Louada Murilla with scant courtesy when she tried to give him the history of Smyrna's most famous organization, and timorously represented to him the social eminence he had attained.

"It isn't as though you didn't have money, and plenty of it," she pleaded. "You can't get any more good out of it than by spending it that way. I tell you, Aaron, it isn't to be sneezed at, leading all the grand marches at the Ancients' dances and being boss of 'em all at the muster, with the band a-playin' and you leading 'em right up the middle of the street. It's worth it, Aaron—and I shall be so proud of you!"

He grumbled less angrily the next morning. But he still insisted that he didn't propose to let the consolidated Todds and Wards of Smyrna bunco him into taking the position, and said that he should attend the next meeting of the Ancients and resign.

But when, on the third evening after his election, the enthusiastic members of the Smyrna A. & H.F.A. came marching up from the village, the brass band tearing the air into ribbons with cornets and trombones, his stiff resolve wilted suddenly. He began to grin shamefacedly under his grizzled beard, and hobbled out onto the porch and made them a stammering speech, and turned scarlet with pride when they cheered him, and basked in the glory of their compliments, and thrilled when they respectfully called him "Chief." He even told Louada Murilla that she was a darling, when she, who had been forewarned, produced a "treat" from a hiding-place in the cellar.

"I knew you'd appreciate it all as soon as you got wonted to the honor, Aaron," she whispered, happy tears in her eyes. "It's the social prominence—that's all there is to it. There hasn't been a fire in the town for fifteen years, and you aren't going to be bothered one mite. Oh, isn't that band just lovely?"

The Cap'n went to bed late that night, his ears tingling with the adulation of the multitude, and in his excited insomnia understanding for the first time in his life the words: "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." He realized more fully now that his shipmaster days had given him a taste for command, and that he had come into his own again.

The new chief of the Ancients devoted the first hours of the next morning to the arrangement of his fire-fighting gear in the front hall, and when all the items had been suspended, so that they would be ready to his hand as well as serve as ornament, he went out on the porch and sunned himself, revelling in a certain snug and contented sense of importance, such as he hadn't felt since he had stepped down from the quarter-deck of his own vessel. He even gazed at the protruding and poignant centre of that rose on his carpet slipper with milder eyes, and sniffed aromatic whiffs of liniment with appreciation of its invigorating odor.

It was a particularly peaceful day. From his porch he could view a wide expanse of rural scenery, and, once in a while, a flash of sun against steel marked the location of some distant farmer in his fields. There were no teams in sight on the highway, for the men of Smyrna were too busily engaged on their acres. He idly watched a trail of dun smoke that rose from behind a distant ridge and zigzagged across the blue sky. He admired it as a scenic attraction, without attaching any importance to it. Even when a woman appeared on the far-off ridge and flapped her apron and hopped up and down and appeared to be frantically signalling either the village in the valley or the men in the fields, he only squinted at her through the sunlight and wondered what ailed her. A sudden inspiring thought suggested that perhaps she had struck a hornets' nest. He chuckled.

A little later a ballooning cloud of dust came rolling down the road toward him and the toll-bridge that led to Smyrna village. He noted that the core of the cloud was a small boy, running so hard that his knees almost knocked under his chin. He spun to a halt in front of the Cap'n's gate and gasped:

"Fi-ah, fi-ah, fi-ah-h-h-h, Chief! Ben Ide's house is a-fi-ah. I'll holler it in the village and git 'em to ring the bell and start 'Hecla.'" Away he tore.

"Fire!" bawled Cap'n Aaron, starting for the front hall with a scuff, a hop, a skip, and jump, in order to favor his sprained toe. "Fire over to Ben Ide's!"

He had his foreman's hat on wrong side to when his wife came bursting out of the sitting-room into the hall. She, loyal though excited lady of the castle, shifted her knight's helmet to the right-about and stuffed his buckets, bag, and bed-wrench into his hands. The cord of his speaking-trumpet she slung over his neck.

"I helped get father ready once, twenty years ago," she stuttered, "and I haven't forgot! Oh, Aaron, I wish you hadn't got such a prejudice against owning a horse and against Marengo when he tried to sell you that one. Now you've got to wait till some one gives you a lift. You can't go on that foot to Ide's."

"Hoss!" he snorted. "Marengo! What he tried to sell me would be a nice thing to git to a fire with! Spavined wusser'n a carpenter's saw-hoss, and with heaves like a gasoline dory! I can hop there on one foot quicker'n he could trot that hoss there! But I'll git there. I'll git there!"

He went limping out of the door, loaded with his equipment.

The Methodist bell had not begun to ring, and it was evident that the messenger of ill tidings had not pattered into the village as yet.

But there was a team in sight. It was "Balm o' Joy" Brackett, his arms akimbo as he fished on the reins to hurry his horse. He was coming from the direction of the toll-bridge, and had evidently met the boy.

"I've got my lo'd—I've got my lo'd, but I'll leave behind me all o' the ro'd," he chirped, when the Cap'n went plunging toward him with the evident intention of getting on board.

"I'm foreman of the Ancients," roared the Cap'n, "and I have the right to press into service any craft I see passin'. Take me aboard, I say, dumblast ye!"

"This ain't no high seas," retorted Brackett, trying to lick past. "You can drive gents out of your dooryard, but you can't do no press-gang bus'ness on 'em."

It was apparent that even "Balm o' Joy's" bland nature could entertain resentment.

"'Tain't right to lay up grudges ag'inst a man that was fussed up like I was, Mister Brackett," pleaded the Cap'n, hopping along beside the van. "I've got to git to that fire, I tell you. I'm the foreman! I'll use you right, after this. I will, I tell you. Lemme on board."

"Promus' flies high when it's hot and dry!" twittered the peddler, still cheerful but obstinate.

"I'll give ye five dollars to take me to Ben Ide's—ten!" he roared, when Brackett showed no sign of stopping.

"Promus' on the ground can be better found. Whoa!" cried Brackett, promptly. "I'll take the fare before you climb up! You'll be so busy when you git to the fire that I wouldn't want to bother you then."

The Cap'n glowered but chewed his lips to prevent retort, pulled his wallet, and paid. Then he gathered his apparatus and grunted up to the high seat.

Far behind them the excited clang-clang of the Methodist bell was pealing its first alarm.

"By the time they git hosses up out of the fields and hitched onto 'Hecla,' and git their buckets and didoes and git started, I reckon things will be fried on both sides at Ben Ide's," chatted the peddler.

"Lick up! Lick up!" barked the Cap'n. "I'm payin' for a quick ride and not conversation."

Brackett clapped the reins along his nag's skinny flank, set his elbows on his knees, and began:

      "There was old Hip Huff, who went by freight,
        To Newry Corner, in—"

"Luff, luff!" snorted the Cap'n, in disgust.

"Luff, luff?" queried the songster.

"Yes, luff! Avast! Belay! Heave to! I don't like caterwaulin'. You keep your mind right on drivin' that hoss."

"You must have been a pop'lar man all your life," remarked the peddler, with a baleful side-glance. "Does politeness come nat'ral to you, or did you learn it out of a book?"

The Cap'n made no reply. He only hitched himself forward as though trying to assist the momentum of the cart, and clutched his buckets, one in each hand.

A woman came flying out of the first house they passed and squalled:

"Where's the fire, Mr. Brackett, and is anybody burnt up, and hadn't you jest as liv' take my rags now? I've got 'em all sacked and ready to weigh, and I sha'n't be to home after to-day."

Brackett pulled up.

"Blast your infernal pelt," howled the Cap'n, "you drive on!"

"Bus'ness is bus'ness," muttered the peddler, "and you ain't bought me and my team with that little old ten dollars of yourn, and you can't do northin', anyway, till Hecla gits there with the boys, and when you're there I don't see what you're goin' to amount to with that sore toe."

He was clearly rebellious. Cap'n Sproul had touched the tenderest spot in T.W. Brackett's nature by that savage yelp at his vocal efforts. But the chief of the Ancients had been wounded as cruelly in his own pride. He stood up and swung a bucket over the crouching peddler.

"Drive on, you lubber," he howled, "or I'll peg you down through that seat like I'd drive a tack. Drive on!"

Brackett ducked his head and drove. And the Cap'n, summoning all the resources of a vocabulary enriched by a sea experience of thirty years, yelled at him and his horse without ceasing.

When they topped the ridge they were in full view of Ide's doomed buildings, and saw the red tongues of flame curling through the rolling smoke.

But a growing clamor behind made the Chief crane his neck and gaze over the top of the van.

"Hecla" was coming!

Four horses were dragging it, and two-score men were howling along with it, some riding, but the most of them clinging to the brake-beams and slamming along through the dust on foot. A man, perched beside the driver, was bellowing something through a trumpet that sounded like:

"Goff-off-errow, goff-off-errow, goff-off-errow!"

The peddler was driving sullenly, and without any particular enterprise. But this tumult behind made his horse prick up his ears and snort. When the nag mended his pace and began to lash out with straddling legs, the Cap'n yelled:

"Let him go! Let him go! They want us to get off the road!"

"Goff-off-errow!" the man still bellowed through the trumpet.

"I've got goods that will break and I'll be cuss-fired if I'll break 'em for you nor the whole Smyrna Fire Department!" screamed Brackett; but when he tried to pull up his steed, the Cap'n, now wholly beside himself and intent only on unrestricted speed, banged a leather bucket down across the driver's hands.

Brackett dropped the reins, with a yell of pain, and they fell into the dust and dragged. The horse broke into a bunchy, jerky gallop, and lunged down the hill, the big van swaying wildly with an ominous rattling and crashing in its mysterious interior.

There were teams coming along a cross-road ahead of them and teams rattling from the opposite direction toward the fire, approaching along the highway they were travelling. Collisions seemed inevitable. But in a moment of inspiration the Cap'n grabbed the trumpet that hung from its red cord around his neck and began to bellow in his turn:

"Goff-off-errow, goff-off-errow!" It was as nearly as human voice could phrase "Get off the road" through the thing.

The terrifying bulk of the big van cleared the way ahead, even though people desperately risked tip-ups in the gutter. As it tore along, horses climbed fences with heads and tails up. There were men floundering in bushes and women squalling from the tops of rock-heaps.

The Chief of the Ancients did not halt to attend to his duties at the fire. He went howling past on the high seat of the van, over the next ridge and out of sight.

"We're goin' to tophet, and you done it, and you've got to pay for it," Brackett wailed over and over, bobbing about on the seat. But the Cap'n did not reply. Teams kept coming into sight ahead, and he had thought only for his monotonous bellow of "Goff-off-errow!"

Disaster—the certain disaster that they had despairingly accepted—met them at the foot of Rines' hill, two miles beyond Ide's. The road curved sharply there to avoid "the Pugwash," as a particularly mushy and malodorous bog was called in local terminology.

At the foot of the hill the van toppled over with a crash and anchored the steaming horse, already staggering in his exhaustion. Both men had scrambled to the top of the van, ready to jump into the Pugwash as they passed. The Cap'n still carried his equipment, both buckets slung upon one arm, and even in this imminent peril it never occurred to him to drop them. Lucky fate made their desperate leap for life a tame affair. When the van toppled they were tossed over the roadside into the bog, lighted on their hands and knees, and sank slowly into its mushiness like two Brobdingnagian frogs.

It was another queer play of fate that the next passer was Marengo Todd, whipping his way to the fire behind a horse that had a bit of wire pinched over his nose to stifle his "whistling."

Marengo Todd leaped out and presented the end of a fence-rail to Brackett first, and pulled him out.

When he stuck the end of the rail under the Cap'n's nose the Cap'n pushed it away with mud-smeared hands.

"I don't, myself, nuss grudges in times of distress, Cap Sproul," shouted Todd. "You kicked me. I know that. But you was in the wrong, and you got the wu'st of it. Proverdunce has allus settled my grudges for me in jest that way. I forgive and pass on, but Proverdunce don't. Take that fence-rail. It sha'n't ever be said by man that Marengo Todd nussed a grudge."

When the Cap'n was once more on solid ground, Todd, still iterating his forgiveness of past injuries, picked up a tin pie-plate that had been jarred out of the van among other litter, and began to scrape the black mud off the foreman of the Ancients in as matter-of-fact a way as though he were currycombing a horse.

The spirit of the doughty mariner seemed broken at last. He looked down at himself, at the mud-clogged buckets and his unspeakable bedragglement.

"I've only got one word to say to you right here and now, Cap'n," went on Todd, meekly, "and it's this, that no man ever gits jest where he wants to git, unless he has a ree-li'ble hoss. I've tried to tell you so before, but—but, well, you didn't listen to me the way you ought to." He continued to scrape, and the Cap'n stared mutely down at the foot that was encased in a muddy slipper.

"Now, there's a hoss standin' there—" pursued Todd.

"What will you take for that team jest as it stands?" blurted the mariner, desperately. The fire, the smoke of which was rolling up above the distant tree-tops, and his duty there made him reckless. As he looked down on Todd he hadn't the heart to demand of that meek and injured person that he should forget and forgive sufficiently to take him in and put him down at Ide's. It seemed like crowding the mourners. Furthermore, Cap'n Aaron Sproul was not a man who traded in humble apologies. His independence demanded a different footing with Todd, and the bitter need of the moment eclipsed economy. "Name your price!"

"A hundred and thutty, ev'rything throwed in, and I'll drive you there a mile a minit," gasped Todd, grasping the situation.

With muddy hands, trembling in haste, the Cap'n drew his long, fat wallet and counted out the bills. Brackett eyed him hungrily.

"You might jest as well settle with me now as later through the law," he cried.

But the Cap'n butted him aside, with an oath, and climbed into the wagon.

"You drive as though the devil had kicked ye," he yelled to Todd. "It's my hoss, and I don't care if you run the four legs off'm him."

Half-way to Ide's, a man leaped the roadside fence and jumped up and down before them in the highway. He had a shotgun in his hands.

"It's my brother—Voltaire," shouted Marengo, pulling up, though Cap'n Sproul swore tempestuously. "You've got to take him on. He b'longs to your fire comp'ny."

"I was out huntin' when I heard the bell," bellowed the new passenger, when he had scrambled to a place behind the wagon-seat, his back toward them and his legs hanging down. "I'm fu'st hoseman, and it's lucky you came along and giv' me a lift." He set his gun-butt down between his knees, the muzzle pointing up.

Cap'n Sproul had his teeth set hard upon a hank of his grizzled whiskers, and his eyes on the smoke ahead. Todd ran his wheezing horse up the ridge, and when they topped it they beheld the whole moving scene below them.

Men were running out of the burning house, throwing armfuls of goods right and left. The "Hecla" was a-straddle of the well, and rows of men were tossing at her brake-beams.

"Give her tar, give her tar!" yelled the man behind, craning his thin neck. Todd lashed at the horse and sent him running down the slope. At the foot of the declivity, just before they came to the lane leading into Ide's place, there was a culvert where the road crossed a brook.

The boarding in the culvert made a jog in the road, and when the wagon struck this at top speed its body flipped behind like the tongue of a catapult.

The man with the gun, having eyes and senses only for the fire and his toiling fellow-Ancients, was unprepared. He went up, out, and down in the dust, doggedly clinging to his gun. He struck the ground with it still between his knees. The impact of the butt discharged both barrels straight into the air.

Flanked by a roaring fire and howling crowd, and bombarded in the rear, even a horse with a bone spavin and the heaves will exhibit the spirit of Bucephalus. One of the rotten reins broke at Marengo's first terrified tug. In less time than it takes to tell, Cap'n Aaron Sproul, desperate and beholding only one resource—the tail flaunting over the dasher—seized it and gave a seaman's sturdy pull. The tail came away in his hands and left only a wildly brandishing stump. Even in that moment of horror, the Cap'n had eyes to see and wit to understand that this false tail was more of Marengo Todd's horse-jockey guile. The look that he turned on the enterprising doctor of caudal baldness was so perfectly diabolical that Marengo chose what seemed the lesser of two evils. He precipitated himself over the back of the seat, dropped to the ground as lightly as a cat, ran wildly until he lost his footing, and dove into some wayside alders. Cap'n Aaron Sproul was left alone with his newly acquired property!

When he hove in sight of his own house he saw Louada Murilla on the porch, gazing off at the smoke of the fire and evidently luxuriating in the consciousness that it was her husband who was that day leading the gallant forces of the Ancients.

As he stared wildly, home seemed his haven and the old house his rock of safety. He did not understand enough about the vagaries of horses and wagons to appreciate the risk. One rein still hung over the dasher.

"Only one jib down-haul left of all the riggin'," he groaned, and then grabbed it and surged on it.

The horse swung out of the road, the wagon careering wildly on two wheels. Sproul crossed the corner of some ploughed land, swept down a length of picket-fence, and came into his own lane, up which the horse staggered, near the end of his endurance. The wagon swung and came to grief against the stone hitching-post at the corner of the porch. Cap'n Sproul, encumbered still with buckets and bag and trumpet, floundered over the porch rail, through a tangled mass of woodbine vines, and into the arms of his distracted wife.

For five minutes after she had supported him to a chair she could do nothing but stare at him, with her hands clasped and her eyes goggling, and cry, "Aaron, Aaron, dear!" in crescendo. His sole replies to her were hollow sounds in his throat that sounded like "unk!"

"Where have you been?" she cried. "All gurry, and wet as sop? If you are hurt what made 'em let their Chief come home all alone with that wild hoss? Aaron, can't you speak?"

He only flapped a muddy hand at her, and seemed to be beyond speech. There was a dull, wondering look in his eyes, as though he were trying to figure out some abstruse problem. He did not brighten until a team came tearing up to the gate, and a man with a scoop fireman's hat on came running to the porch. The man saluted.

"Chief," he said, with the air of an aide reporting on the field of battle, "that house and barn got away from us, but we fit well for 'em—yas s'r, we fit well! It is thought queer in some quarters that you wasn't there to take charge, but I told the boys that you'd prob'ly got good reasons, and they'll git over their mad, all right. You needn't worry none about that!"

The Cap'n's sole reply was another of those hollow "unks!"

"But the boys is pretty well beat out, and so I've run over to ask if you'll let us use your ten-dollar fine for a treat? That will help their feelin's to'ards you a good deal, and—"

The Cap'n, without taking his eyes from the smug face of the man, swung one of the buckets and let drive at him. It missed. But he had got his range, and the next bucket knocked off the scoop hat. When the Cap'n scrambled to his feet, loaded with the bed-wrench for his next volley, the man turned and ran for his team. The bed-wrench caught him directly between the shoulders—a masterly shot. The trumpet flew wild, but by that time the emissary of the Ancients was in his wagon and away.

"Aaron!" his wife began, quaveringly, but the Cap'n leaped toward her, pulled the mouth of the puckering-bag over her head, and hopped into the house. When at last she ventured to peer in at the sitting-room window, he was tearing the book of "Rules of the Smyrna Ancient and Honorable Firemen's Association," using both his hands and his teeth, and worrying it as a dog worries a bone.

That was his unofficial resignation. The official one came as soon as he could control his language.

And for a certain, prolonged period in the history of the town of Smyrna it was well understood that Cap'n Aaron Sproul was definitely out of public affairs. But in public affairs it often happens that honors that are elusive when pursued are thrust upon him who does not seek them.

The moderator of the Smyrna town meeting held his breath for just a moment so as to accentuate the hush in which the voters listened for his words, and then announced the result of the vote for first selectman of Smyrna:

"Whole number cast, one hundred thutty-two; necessary for a choice, sixty-seven; of which Colonel Gideon Ward has thutty-one."

A series of barking, derisive yells cut in upon his solemn announcement, and he rapped his cane on the marred table of the town hall and glared over his spectacles at the voters.

"And Cap'n Aaron Sproul has one hundred and—"

The howl that followed clipped his last words. Men hopped upon the knife-nicked settees of the town house and waved their hats while they hooted. A group of voters, off at one side, sat and glowered at this hilarity. Out of the group rose Colonel Gideon, his long frame unfolding with the angularity of a carpenter's two-foot rule. There were little dabs of purple on his knobby cheek-bones. His hair and his beard bristled. He put up his two fists as far as his arms would reach and vibrated them, like a furious Jeremiah calling down curses.

Such ferocious mien had its effect on the spectators after a time. Smyrna quailed before her ancient tyrant, even though he was dethroned.

"Almighty God has always wanted an excuse to destroy this town like Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed," he shouted, his voice breaking into a squeal of rage; "now He's got it."

He drove his pointed cap onto his head, gave a parting shake of his fists that embraced moderator, voters, walls, floor, roof, and all appurtenances of the town house, and stalked down the aisle and out. The silence in town meeting was so profound that the voters heard him welting his horse as he drove away.

After a time the moderator drew a long breath, and stated that he did not see Cap'n Aaron Sproul in the meeting, and had been informed that he was not present.

"I come past his place this mornin'," whispered Old Man Jordan to his neighbor on the settee, "and he was out shovelin' snow off'm the front walk, and when I asked him if he wa'n't comin' to town meetin', he said that a run of the seven years' itch and the scurvy was pretty bad, but he reckoned that politics was wuss. I should hate to be the one that has to break this news to him."

"And seein' how it's necessary to have the first selectman here to be sworn in before the meetin' closes this afternoon," went on the moderator, "I'll appoint a committee of three to wait on Cap'n Aaron Sproul and notify him of the distinguished honor that has been done him this day by his feller townsmen."

He settled his spectacles more firmly upon his nose, and ran his gaze calculatingly over the assembled voters. No one of those patriotic citizens seemed to desire to be obtrusive at that moment.

"I'll appoint as chairman of that notifying committee," proceeded the moderator, "Entwistle Harvey, and as—"

"I shall have to decline the honor," interrupted Mr. Entwistle Harvey, rising promptly. The voters grinned. They thoroughly understood the reason for Mr. Harvey's reluctance.

"It ain't that I'm any less a reformer than the others that has to-day redeemed this town from ring rule and bossism," declared Mr. Harvey, amid applause; "it ain't that I don't admire the able man that has been selected to lead us up out of the vale of political sorrow—and I should be proud to stand before him and offer this distinguished honor from the voters of this town, but I decline because I—I—well, there ain't any need of goin' into personal reasons. I ain't the man for the place, that's all." He sat down.

"I don't blame him none for duckin'," murmured Old Man Jordan to his seat companion. "Any man that was in the crowd that coaxed Cap'n Sproul into takin' the foremanship of Heckly Fire Comp'ny has got a good excuse. I b'lieve the law says that ye can't put a man twice in peril of his life."

Cap'n Sproul's stormy relinquishment of the hateful honor that had been foisted upon him by the Smyrna fire-fighters was history recent enough to give piquant relish to the present situation. He had not withheld nor modified his threats as to what would happen to any other committee that came to him proffering public office.

The more prudent among Smyrna's voters had hesitated about making the irascible ex-mariner a candidate for selectman's berth.

But Smyrna, in its placid New England eddy, had felt its own little thrill from the great tidal wave of municipal reform sweeping the country. It immediately gazed askance at Colonel Gideon Ward, for twenty years first selectman of Smyrna, and growled under its breath about "bossism." But when the search was made for a candidate to run against him, Smyrna men were wary. Colonel Ward held too many mortgages and had advanced too many call loans not to be well fortified against rivals.

"The only one who has ever dared to twist his tail is his brother-in-law, the Cap'n," said Odbar Broadway, oracularly, to the leaders who had met in his store to canvass the political situation. "The Cap'n won't be as supple as some in town office, but he ain't no more hell 'n' repeat than what we've been used to for the last twenty years. He's wuth thutty thousand dollars, and Gid Ward can't foreclose no mo'gidge on him nor club him with no bill o' sale. He's the only prominunt man in town that can afford to take the office away from the Colonel. What ye've got to do is to go ahead and elect him, and then trust to the Lord to make him take it."

So that was what Smyrna had done on that slushy winter's day.

It did it with secret joy and with ballots hidden in its palms, where the snapping eyes of Colonel Ward could not spy.

And now, instead of invoking the higher power mentioned as a resource by Broadway, the moderator of the town meeting was struggling with human tools, and very rickety human tools they seemed to be.

Five different chairmen did he nominate, and with great alacrity the five refused to serve.

The moderator took off his glasses, and testily rapped the dented table.

"Feller citizens," he snapped, "this is gittin' to be boys' play. I realize puffickly that Cap'n Aaron Sproul, our first selectman-elect, has not been a seeker after public office since he retired as foreman of the Hecla Fire Company. I realize puffickly that he entertained some feelin' at the time that—that—he wasn't exactly cal'lated to be foreman of an engine company. But that ain't sayin' that he won't receive like gentlemen the committee that comes to tell him that he has been elected to the highest office in this town. I ain't got any more time to waste on cowards. There's one man here that ain't afraid of his own shadder. I call on Constable Zeburee Nute to head the committee, and take along with him Constables Wade and Swanton. And I want to say to the voters here that it's a nice report to go abroad from this town that we have to pick from the police force to get men with enough courage to tell a citizen that he's been elected first selectman. But the call has gone out for Cincinnatus, and he must be brought here."

The moderator's tone was decisive and his mien was stern. Otherwise, even the doughty Constable Nute might have refused to take orders, though they were given in the face and eyes of his admiring neighbors. He gnawed at his grizzled beard and fingered doubtfully the badge that, as chief constable of the town, he wore on the outside of his coat.

"Gents of the committee, please 'tend promptly to the duties assigned," commanded the moderator, "and we will pass on to the next article in the town warrant."

Mr. Nute rose slowly and marched out of the hall, the other two victims following without any especial signs of enthusiasm.

In the yard of the town house Mr. Nute faced them, and remarked:

"I have some ideas of my own as to a genteel way of gittin' him interested in this honor that we are about to bestow. Has any one else ideas?"

The other two constables shook their heads gloomily.

"Then I'll take the brunt of the talk on me and foller my ideas," announced Mr. Nute. "I've been studyin' reform, and, furthermore, I know who Cincinnatus was!"

The three men unhitched each his own team, and drove slowly, in single file, along the mushy highway.

It was one of Cap'n Aaron Sproul's mentally mild, mellow, and benign days, when his heart seemed to expand like a flower in the comforts of his latter-life domestic bliss. Never had home seemed so good—never the little flush on Louada Murilla's cheeks so attractive in his eyes as they dwelt fondly on her.

In the night he had heard the sleet clattering against the pane and the snow slishing across the clapboards, and he had turned on his pillow with a little grunt of thankfulness.

"There's things about dry land and the people on it that ain't so full of plums as a sailor's duff ought to be," he mused, "but—" And then he dozed off, listening to the wind.

In the morning, just for a taste of rough weather, he had put on his slicker and sea-boots and shovelled the slush off the front walk. Then he sat down with stockinged feet held in the radiance of an open Franklin stove, and mused over some old log-books that he liked to thumb occasionally for the sake of adding new comfort to a fit of shore contentment.

This day he was taking especial interest in the log-books, for he was again collaborating with Louada Murilla in that spasmodic literary effort that she had termed:

"You can put down what's true," he said, continuing a topic that they had been pursuing, "that boxin' the compass and knowin' a jib down-haul from a pound of saleratus ain't all there is to a master mariner's business, not by a blamed sight. Them passuls of cat's meat that they call sailormen in these days has to be handled,—well, the superintendent of a Sunday-school wouldn't be fit for the job, unless he had a little special trainin'."

Louada Murilla, the point of her pencil at her lips, caught a vindictive gleam in his eyes.

"But it seems awful cruel, some of the things that you—you—I suppose you had to do 'em, Aaron! And yet when you stop and think that they've got immortal souls to save—"

"They don't carry any such duffle to sea in their dunnage-bags," snapped the skipper. "Moral suasion on them would be about like tryin' to whittle through a turkle's shell with a hummin'-bird's pin-feather. My rule most generally was to find one soft spot on 'em somewhere that a marlin-spike would hurt, and then hit that spot hard and often. That's the only way I ever got somewhere with a cargo and got back ag'in the same year."

"I suppose it has to be," sighed his wife, making a note. "It's like killing little calves for veal, and all such things that make the fond heart ache."

The Cap'n was "leaving" the grimy pages of a log-book. He paused over certain entries, and his face darkened. There was no more vindictiveness in his expression. It was regret and a sort of vague worry.

"What is it, Aaron?" asked his wife, with wistful apprehensiveness.

"Northin'," he growled.

"But I know it's something," she insisted, "and I'm always ready to share your burdens."

Cap'n Sproul looked around on the peace of his home, and some deep feeling seemed to surge in his soul.

"Louada Murilla," he said, sadly, "this isn't anything to be written in the book, and I didn't ever mean to speak of it to you. But there are times when a man jest has to talk about things, and he can't help it. There was one thing that I've been sorry for. I've said so to myself, and I'm goin' to say as much to you. Confession is good for the soul, so they say, and it may help me out some to tell you."

The horrified look on her face pricked him to speak further. 'Tis a titillating sensation, sometimes, to awe or shock those whom we love, when we know that forgiveness waits ready at hand.

"There was once—there was one man—I hit him dretful hard. He was a Portygee. But I hit him too hard. It was a case of mutiny. I reckon I could have proved it was mutiny, with the witnesses. But I hit him hard."

"Did he—?" gasped his wife.

"He did," replied the Cap'n, shortly, and was silent for a time.

"The thing for me to have done," he went on, despondently, "was to report it, and stood hearin'. But it was six weeks after we'd dropped him overboard—after the funeral, ye know—before we reached port. And there was a cargo ashore jest dancin' up and down to slip through the main hatch as soon as t' other one was over the rail—and freights 'way up and owners anxious for results, and me tryin' for a record, and all that, ye know. All is, there wa'n't nothin' said by the crew, for they wa'n't lookin' for trouble, and knowed the circumstances, and so I lo'ded and sailed. And that's all to date."

"But they say 'murder will out.'" Her face was white.

"It wa'n't murder. It was discipline. And I didn't mean to. But either his soft spot was too soft, or else I hit too hard. What I ought to have done was to report when my witnesses was right handy. Since I've settled and married and got property, I've woke up in the night, sometimes, and thought what would happen to me if that Portygee's relatives got track of me through one of the crew standin' in with 'em—blabbin' for what he could git out of it. I have to think about those things, now that I've got time to worry. Things looks different ashore from what they do aflo't, with your own ship under you and hustlin' to make money." He gazed round the room again, and seemed to luxuriate in his repentance.

"But if anything should be said, you could hunt up those men and—"

"Hunt what?" the Cap'n blurted. "Hunt tarheels once they've took their dunnage-bags over the rail? Hunt whiskers on a flea! What are you talkin' about? Why, Louada Murilla, I never even knowed what the Portygee's name was, except that I called him Joe. A skipper don't lo'd his mem'ry with that sculch any more'n he'd try to find names for the hens in the deck-coop.

"I made a mistake," he continued, after a time, "in not havin' it cleaned up, decks washed, and everything clewed snug at the time of it. But ev'ry man makes mistakes. I made mine then. It would be God-awful to have it come down on me when I couldn't prove nothin' except that I give him the best funeral I could. There ain't much of anything except grit in the gizzard of a United States court. They seem to think the Govumment wants every one hung. I remember a captain once who—"

He paused suddenly, for he caught sight of three muddy wagons trundling in procession into the yard. In the first one sat Constable Zeburee Nute, his obtrusive nickel badge on his overcoat.

Cap'n Sproul looked at Louada Murilla, and she stared at him, and in sudden panic both licked dry lips and were silent. The topic they had been pursuing left their hearts open to terror. There are moments when a healthy body suddenly absorbs germs of consumption that it has hitherto thrown off in hale disregard. There are moments when the mind and courage are overwhelmed by panic that reason does not pause to analyze.

Louada Murilla opened the front door when the chief constable knocked, after an exasperatingly elaborate hitching and blanketing of horses. She staggered to the door rather than walked. The Cap'n sat with rigid legs still extended toward the fire.

The three men filed into the room, and remained standing in solemn row. Mr. Nute, on behalf of the delegation, refused chairs that were offered by Mrs. Sproul. He had his own ideas as to how a committee of notification should conduct business. He stood silent and looked at Louada Murilla steadily and severely until she realized that her absence was desired.

She tottered out of the room, her terrified eyes held in lingering thrall by the woe-stricken orbs of the Cap'n.

Constable Nute eyed the door that she closed, waiting a satisfactory lapse of time, and then cleared his throat and announced:

"I want you to realize, Cap'n Sproul, that me and my feller constables here has been put in a sort of a hard position. I hope you'll consider that and govern yourself accordin'. First of all, we're obeyin' orders from them as has authority. I will say, however, that I have ideas as to how a thing ought to be handled, and my associates have agreed to leave the talkin' to me. I want to read you somethin' first," he said, fumbling at the buttons on his coat, "but that you may have some notion as to what it all points and be thinkin' it over, I'll give you a hint. To a man of your understandin', I don't s'pose I have to say more than 'Cincinnatus,' That one word explains itself and our errunt."

"I never knowed his last name," mumbled the Cap'n, enigmatically. "But I s'pose they've got it in the warrant, all right!" He was eying the hand that was seeking the constable's inside pocket. "I never was strong on Portygee names. I called him Joe."

Mr. Nute merely stared, without trying to catch the drift of this indistinct muttering.

While the Cap'n watched him in an agony of impatience and suspense, he slowly drew out a spectacle-case, settled his glasses upon his puffy nose, unfolded a sheet of paper on which a dirty newspaper clipping was pasted, and began to read:

"More than ever before in the history of the United States of America are loyal citizens called upon to throw themselves into the breach of municipal affairs, and wrest from the hands of the guilty—"

The ears of Cap'n Sproul, buzzing with his emotions, caught only a few words, nor grasped any part of the meaning. But the sonorous "United States of America" chilled his blood, and the word "guilty" made his teeth chatter.

He felt an imperious need of getting out of that room for a moment—of getting where he could think for a little while, out from under the starings of those three solemn men.

"I want to—I want to—" he floundered; "I would like to get on my shoes and my co't and—and—I'll be right back. I won't try to—I'll be right back, I say."

Mr. Nute suspended his reading, looked over his spectacles, and gave the required permission. Perhaps it occurred to his official sense that a bit more dignified attire would suit the occasion better. A flicker of gratification shone on his face at the thought that the Cap'n was so nobly and graciously rising to the spirit of the thing.

"It's come, Louada Murilla—it's come!" gulped Cap'n Sproul, as he staggered into the kitchen, where his wife cowered in a corner. "He's readin' a warrant. He's even got the Portygee's name. My Gawd, they'll hang me! I can't prove northin'."

"Oh, Aaron," sobbed his wife, and continued to moan. "Oh, Aaron—" with soft, heartbreaking cluckings.

"Once the law of land-piruts gets a bight 'round ye, ye never git away from it," groaned the Cap'n. "The law sharks is always waitin' for seafarin' men. There ain't no hope for me."

His wife had no encouragement to offer.

"Murder will out, Aaron," she quaked. "And they've sent three constables."

"Them other two—be they—?"

"They're constables."

"There ain't no hope. And it shows how desp'rit' they think I be. It shows they're bound to have me. It's life and death, Louada Murilla. If I don't git anything but State Prison, it's goin' to kill me, for I've lived too free and open to be penned up at my time o' life. It ain't fair—it ain't noways fair!" His voice broke. "It was all a matter of discipline. But you can't prove it to land-sharks. If they git me into their clutches I'm a goner."

His pistols hung on the wall where Louada Murilla had suspended them, draped with the ribbons of peace.

"There's only one thing to do," he whispered, huskily, pointing at the weapons with quivering finger. "I'll shoot 'em in the legs, jest to hold 'em up. I'll git to salt water. I know skippers that will take me aboard, even if they have to stand off the whole United States. I've got friends, Louada, as soon as I git to tide-water. It won't hurt 'em in there—a bullet in the leg. And it's life and death for me. There's foreign countries where they can't take me up. I know 'em, I've been there. And I'll send for you, Louada Murilla. It's the best I can think of now. It ain't what I should choose, but it's the best I can think of. I've had short notice. I can't let 'em take me."

As he talked he seemed to derive some comfort from action. He pulled on his boots. He wriggled into his coat. From a pewter pitcher high up on a dresser shelf he secured a fat wallet. But when he rushed to take down the pistols his wife threw herself into his arms.

"You sha'n't do that, Aaron," she cried. "I'll go to State Prison with you—I'll go to the ends of the world to meet you. But I couldn't have those old men shot in our own house. I realize you've got to get away. But blood will never wash out blood. Take one of their teams. Run the horse to the railroad-station. It's only four miles, and you've got a half-hour before the down-train. And I'll lock 'em into the setting-room, Aaron, and keep 'em as long as I can. And I'll come to you, Aaron, though I have to follow you clear around the world."

In the last, desperate straits of an emergency, many a woman's wits ring truer than a man's. When she had kissed him and departed on her errand to lock the front door he realized that her counsel was good.

He left the pistols on the wall. As he ran into the yard, he got a glimpse, through the sitting-room window, of the constables standing in solemn row. Never were innocent members of committee of notification more blissfully unconscious of what they had escaped. They were blandly gazing at the Cap'n's curios ranged on mantel and what-not.

It was a snort from Constable Swanton that gave the alarm. Mr. Nute's team was spinning away down the road, the wagon-wheels throwing slush with a sort of fireworks effect. Cap'n Sproul, like most sailors, was not a skilful driver, but he was an energetic one. The horse was galloping.

"He's bound for the town house before he's been notified officially," stammered Mr. Swanton.

"It ain't regular," said Constable Wade.

Mr. Nute made no remark. He looked puzzled, but he acted promptly. He found the front door locked and the kitchen door locked. But the window-catches were on the inside, and he slammed up the nearest sash and leaped out. The others followed. The pursuit was on as soon as they could get to their wagons, Mr. Wade riding with the chief constable.

The town house of Smyrna is on the main road leading to the railway-station. The constables, topping a hill an eighth of a mile behind the fugitive, expected to see him turn in at the town house. But he tore past, his horse still on the run, the wagon swaying wildly as he turned the corner beyond the Merrithew sugar orchard.

"Well, I swow," grunted Mr. Nute, and licked on.

The usual crowd of horse-swappers was gathered in the town-house yard, and beheld this tumultuous passage with professional interest. And, recognizing the first selectman-elect of Smyrna, their interest had an added flavor.

Next came the two teams containing the constables, lashing past on the run. They paid no attention to the amazed yells of inquiry from the horse-swappers, and disappeared behind the sugar orchard.

"You've got me!" said Uncle Silas Drake to the first out-rush of the curious from the town house. In his amazement, Uncle Silas was still holding to the patient nose of the horse whose teeth he had been examining. "They went past like soft-soap slidin' down the suller stairs, and that's as fur's I'm knowin'. But I want to remark, as my personal opinion, that a first seeleckman of this town ought to be 'tendin' to his duties made and pervided, instead of razooin' hosses up and down in front of this house when town meetin' is goin' on."

One by one, voters, mumbling their amazement, unhitched their horses and started along the highway in the direction the fugitives had taken. It seemed to all that this case required to be investigated. The procession whipped along briskly and noisily.

Colonel Gideon Ward, returning from the railroad-station, where he had been to order flat-cars for lumber, heard the distant clamor of voices, and stood up in his tall cart to listen. At that instant, around the bend of the road, twenty feet away, came a horse galloping wildly. Colonel Ward was halted squarely in the middle of the way. He caught an amazed glimpse of Cap'n Sproul trying to rein to one side with unskilled hands, and then the wagons met. Colonel Ward's wagon stood like a rock. The lighter vehicle, locking wheels, went down with a crash, and Cap'n Sproul shot head-on over the dasher into his brother-in-law's lap, as he crouched on his seat.

The advantage was with Cap'n Sproul, for the Colonel was underneath. Furthermore, Cap'n Sproul was thrice armed with the resolution of a desperate man. Without an instant's hesitation he drew back, hit Ward a few resounding buffets on either side of his head, and then tossed the dizzied man out of his wagon into the roadside slush. An instant later he had the reins, swung the frightened horse across the gutter and around into the road, and continued his flight in the direction of the railroad-station.

The constables, leading the pursuing voters by a few lengths, found Colonel Ward sitting up in the ditch and gaping in utter amazement and dire wrath at the turn of the road where Cap'n Sproul had swept out of sight.

The wreck of the wagon halted them.

"I s'pose you've jest seen our first selectman-elect pass this way, haven't ye?" inquired Mr. Nute, with official conservatism.

The Colonel had not yet regained his powers of speech. He jabbed with bony finger in the direction of the railroad, and moved his jaws voicelessly. Mr. Swanton descended from the wagon, helped him out of the ditch, and began to stroke the slush from his garments with mittened hand. As he still continued to gasp ineffectually, Mr. Nute drove on, leaving him standing by the roadside.

Cap'n Sproul was at bay on the station platform, feet braced defiantly apart, hat on the back of his head, and desperate resolve flaming from his eyes.

"Don't ye git out of your wagon, Nute," he rasped. "It's been touch and go once with the three of ye to-day. I could have killed ye like sheep. Don't git in my way ag'in. Take warnin'! It's life or death, and a few more don't make much difference to me now."

The chief constable stared at him with bulging eyes.

"I could have killed ye and I didn't," repeated the Cap'n. "Let that show ye that I'm square till I have to be otherwise. But I'm a desp'rit' man, Nute. I'm goin' to take that train." He brandished his fist at a trail of smoke up behind the spruces. "Gawd pity the man that gits in my way!"

"Somethin' has happened to his mind all of a sudden," whispered Mr. Wade. "He ought to be took care of till he gits over it. It would be a pity and a shame to let a prominent man like that git away and fall into the hands of strangers."

"All of ye take warnin'," bawled the Cap'n to his townsmen, who were crowding their wagons into the station square.

Constable Zeburee Nute drove his whip into the socket, threw down his reins, and stood up. The hollow hoot of the locomotive had sounded up the track.

"Feller citizens," he cried, "as chairman of the committee of notification, I desire to report that I have 'tended to my duties in so far as I could to date. But there has things happened that I can't figger out, and for which I ain't responsible. There ain't no time now for ifs, buts, or ands. That train is too near. A certain prominunt citizen that I don't need to name is thinkin' of takin' that train when he ain't fit to do so. There'll be time to talk it over afterward."

Cap'n Sproul was backing away to turn the corner of the station.

"I call on all of ye as a posse," bawled Mr. Nute. "Bring along your halters and don't use no vi'lence."

Samson himself, even though his weapon had been the jaw-bone of a megatherium, couldn't have resisted that onrush of the willing populace. In five minutes, the Cap'n, trussed hand and foot, and crowded in between Constables Nute and Wade, was riding back toward Smyrna town house, helpless as a veal calf bound for market.

"Now," resumed Mr. Nute, calmly, "now that you're with us, Cap'n, and seem to be quieted down a little, I'll perceed to execute the errunt put upon me as chairman of the notification committee."

With Mr. Wade driving slowly, he read the newspaper clipping that sounded the clarion call that summoned men of probity to public office, and at the close formally notified Cap'n Sproul that he had been elected first selectman of Smyrna. He did all this without enthusiasm, and sighed with official relief when it was over.

"And," he wound up, "it is the sentiment of this town that there ain't another man in it so well qualified to lead us up out of the valley of darkness where we've been wallerin'. We have called our Cincinnatus to his duty."

They had come around a bend of the road and now faced Colonel Ward, stumping along stolidly through the slush, following the trail of his team.

"That's the way he ought to be," roared the Colonel. "Rope him up! Put ox-chains on him. And I'll give a thousand dollars to build an iron cage for him. You're all crazy and he's your head lunatic."

Mr. Nute, inwardly, during all the time that he had been so calmly addressing his captive, was tortured with cruel doubts as to the Cap'n's sanity. But he believed in discharging his duty first. And he remembered that insane people were more easily prevailed upon by those who appeared to make no account of their whims.

During it all, Cap'n Sproul had been silent in utter amazement. The truth had come in a blinding flash that would have unsettled a man not so well trained to control emotion.

"Drive along," he curtly commanded Nute, paying no heed to the incensed Colonel's railings. "You look me in the eye," he continued, as soon as they were out of hearing. "Do you see any signs that I am out of my head, or that I need these ropes on me?"

"I can't say as I do," admitted the constable, after he had quailed a bit under the keen, straightforward stare of the ex-mariner's hard, gray eyes.

"Take 'em off, then," directed the Cap'n, in tones of authority. And when it was done, he straightened his hat, set back his shoulders, and said:

"Drive me to the town house where I was bound when that hoss of yours run away with me." Mr. Nute stared at him wildly, and drove on.

They were nearly to their destination before Constable Nute ventured upon what his twisted brow and working lips testified he had been pondering long.

"It ain't that I'm tryin' to pry into your business, Cap'n Sproul, nor anything of the kind, but, bein' a man that never intended to do any harm to any one, I can't figger out what grudge you've got against me. You said on the station platform that—"

"Nute," said the Cap'n, briskly, "as I understand it, you never went to sea, and you and the folks round here don't understand much about sailormen, hey?"

The constable shook his head.

"Then don't try to find out much about 'em. You wouldn't understand. The folks round here wouldn't understand. We have our ways. You have your ways. Some of the things you do and some of the things you say could be called names by me, providin' I wanted to be disagreeable and pick flaws. All men in this world are different—especially sailormen from them that have always lived inshore. We've got to take our feller man as we find him."

They were in the town-house yard—a long procession of teams following.

"And by-the-way, Nute," bawled the Cap'n, from the steps of the building as he was going in, using his best sea tones so that all might hear, "it was the fault of your horse that he run away, and you ought to be prosecuted for leavin' such an animile 'round where a sailorman that ain't used to hosses could get holt of him. But I'm always liberal about other folks' faults. Bring in your bill for the wagon."

Setting his teeth hard, he walked upon the platform of the town-hall, and faced the voters with such an air of authority and such self-possession that they cheered him lustily. And then, with an intrepidity that filled his secret heart with amazement as he talked, he made the first real speech of his life—a speech of acceptance.

"Yes, s'r, it was a speech, Louada Murilla," he declared that evening, as he sat again in their sitting-room with his stockinged feet to the blaze of the Franklin. "I walked that platform like it was a quarter-deck, and my line of talk run jest as free as a britches-buoy coil. And when I got done, they was up on the settees howlin' for me. If any man came back into that town-house thinkin' I was a lunatic on account of what happened to-day, they got a diff'runt notion before I got done. Why, they all come 'round and shook my hand, and said they must have been crazy to tackle a prominunt citizen that way on the word of old Nute. It must have been a great speech I made. They all said so."

He relighted his pipe.

"What did you say, Aaron?" eagerly asked his wife. "Repeat it over."

He smoked awhile.

"Louada Murilla," he said, "when I walked onto that platform my heart was goin' like a donkey-engine workin' a winch, there was a sixty-mile gale blowin' past my ears, and a fog-bank was front of my eyes. And when the sun came out ag'in and it cleared off, the moderator was standin' there shaking my hand and tellin' me what a speech it was. It was a speech that had to be made. They had to be bluffed. But as to knowin' a word of what I said, why, I might jest as well try to tell you what the mermaid said when the feller brought her stockin's for her birthday present.

"The only thing that I can remember about that speech," he resumed, after a pause, and she gazed on him hopefully, "is that your brother Gideon busted into the town house and tried to break up my speech by tellin' 'em I was a lunatic. I ordered the constables to put him out."

"Did they?" she asked, with solicitude.

"No," he replied, rubbing his nose, reflectively. "'Fore the constables got to him, the boys took holt and throwed him out of the window. I reckon he's come to a realizin' sense by this time that the town don't want him for selectman."

He rapped out the ashes and put the pipe on the hearth of the Franklin.

"I'm fair about an enemy, Louada Murilla, and I kind of hate to rub it into Gideon. But now that I'm on this bluff about what happened to-day, I've got to work it to a finish. I'm goin' to sue Gid for obstructin' the ro'd and smashin' Nute's wagon, and then jumpin' out and leavin' me to be run away with. The idea is, there are some fine touches needed in lyin' out of that part of the scrape, and, as the first selectman of Smyrna, I can't afford to take chances and depend on myself, and be showed up. I don't hold any A.B. certificate when it comes to lyin'. So for them fancy touches, I reckon I'll have to break my usual rule and hire a lawyer."

He rose and yawned.

"Is the cat put out, Louada?"

And when she had replied in the affirmative, he said:

"Seein' it has been quite a busy day, let's go to bed."

Mrs. Hiram Look, lately "Widder Snell," appearing as plump, radiant, and roseate as a bride in her honeymoon should appear—her color assisted by the caloric of a cook-stove in June—put her head out of the buttery window and informed the inquiring Cap'n Aaron Sproul that Hiram was out behind the barn.

"Married life seems still to be agreein' with all concerned," suggested Cap'n Sproul, quizzically. "Even that flour on your nose is becomin'."

"Go 'long, you old rat!" tittered Mrs. Look. "Better save all your compliments for your own wife!"

"Oh, I tell her sweeter things than that," replied the Cap'n, serenely. With a grin under his beard, he went on toward the barn.

Smyrna gossips were beginning to comment, with more or less spite, on the sudden friendship between their first selectman and Hiram Look, since Look—once owner of a road circus—had retired from the road, had married his old love, and had settled down on the Snell farm. Considering the fact that the selectman and showman had bristled at each other like game-cocks the first time they met, Smyrna wondered at the sudden effusion of affection that now kept them trotting back and forth on almost daily visits to each other.

Batson Reeves, second selectman of Smyrna, understood better than most of the others. It was on him as a common anvil that the two of them had pounded their mutual spite cool. Hiram, suddenly reappearing with a plug hat and a pet elephant, after twenty years of wandering, had won promptly the hand of Widow Snell, nee Amanda Purkis, whose self and whose acres Widower Reeves was just ready to annex. And Hiram had thereby partially satisfied the old boyhood grudge planted deep in his stormy temper when Batson Reeves had broken up the early attachment between Hiram Look and Amanda Purkis. As for First Selectman Sproul, hot in his fight with Reeves for official supremacy, his league with Hiram, after an initial combat to try spurs, was instant and cordial as soon as he had understood a few things about the showman's character and purpose.

"Birds of a feather!" gritted Reeves, in his confidences with his intimates. "An' old turkle-back of a sea-capt'in runnin' things in this town 'fore he's been here two years, jest 'cause he's got cheek enough and thutty thousand dollars—and now comes that old gas-bag with a plug hat on it, braggin' of his own thutty thousand dollars, and they hitch up! Gawd help Smyrna, that's all I say!"

And yet, had all the spiteful eyes in Smyrna peered around the corner of the barn on that serene June forenoon, they must have softened just a bit at sight of the placid peace of it all.

The big doors were rolled back, and "Imogene," the ancient elephant whose fond attachment to Hiram had preserved her from the auction-block, bent her wrinkled front to the soothing sunshine and "weaved" contentedly on her slouchy legs. She was watching her master with the thorough appreciation of one who has understood and loved the "sportin' life."

Hiram was in shirt-sleeves and bareheaded, his stringy hair combed over his bald spot. His long-tailed coat and plug hat hung from a wooden peg on the side of the barn. In front of him was a loose square of burlap, pegged to the ground at one edge, its opposite edge nailed to the barn, and sloping at an angle of forty-five degrees.

As Cap'n Sproul rounded the corner Hiram had just tossed a rooster in the air over the burlap. The bird came down flapping its wings; its legs stuck out stiffly. When it struck the rude net it bounded high, and came down again, and continued its grotesque hornpipe until it finally lost its spring.

"I'm only givin' P.T. Barnum his leg-exercise," said Hiram, recovering the rooster and sticking him under one arm while he shook hands with his caller. "I don't expect to ever match him again in this God-forsaken country, but there's some comfort in keepin' him in trainin'. Pinch them thighs, Cap'n! Ain't they the wickin'?"

"I sh'd hate to try to eat 'em," said the Cap'n, gingerly poking his stubby finger against the rooster's leg.

"Eat 'em!" snapped the showman, raking the horns of his long mustache irritably away from his mouth. "You talk like the rest of these farmers round here that never heard of a hen bein' good for anything except to lay eggs and be et for a Thanksgivin' dinner." He held the rooster a-straddle his arm, his broad hand on its back, and shook him under the Cap'n's nose. "I've earnt more'n a thousand dollars with P.T.—and that's a profit in the hen business that all the condition powders this side of Tophet couldn't fetch."

"A thousand dollars!" echoed Cap'n Sproul, stuffing his pipe. He gazed at P.T. with new interest. "He must have done some fightin' in his day."

"Fight!" cried the showman. He tossed the rooster upon the burlap once more. "Fight! Look at that leg action! That's the best yaller-legged, high-station game-cock that ever pecked his way out of a shell. I've taken all comers 'twixt Hoorah and Hackenny, and he ain't let me down yet. Look at them brad-awls of his!"

"Mebbe all so, but I don't like hens, not for a minit," growled the first selectman, squinting sourly through his tobacco-smoke at the dancing fowl.

Hiram got a saucer from a shelf inside the barn and set it on the ground.

"Eat your chopped liver, P.T.," he commanded; "trainin' is over."

He relighted his stub of cigar and bent proud gaze on the bird.

"No, sir," pursued the Cap'n, "I ain't got no use for a hen unless it's settin', legs up, on a platter, and me with a carvin'-knife."

"Always felt that way?" inquired Hiram.

"Not so much as I have sence I've been tryin' to start my garden this spring. As fur back as the time I was gittin' the seed in, them hens of Widder Sidene Pike, that lives next farm to mine, began their hellishness, with that old wart-legged ostrich of a rooster of her'n to lead 'em. They'd almost peck the seeds out of my hand, and the minit I'd turn my back they was over into that patch, right foot, left foot, kick heel and toe, and swing to pardners—and you couldn't see the sun for dirt. And at every rake that rooster lifts soil enough to fill a stevedore's coal-bucket."

"Why don't you shoot 'em?" advised Hiram, calmly.

"Me—the first s'lectman of this town out poppin' off a widder's hens? That would be a nice soundin' case when it got into court, wouldn't it?"

"Get into court first and sue her," advised the militant Hiram.

"I donno as I've ever said it to you, but I've al'ays said it to close friends," stated the Cap'n, earnestly, "that there are only three things on earth I'm afraid of, and them are: pneumony, bein' struck by lightnin', and havin' a land-shark git the law on me. There ain't us'ly no help for ye."

He sighed and smoked reflectively. Then his face hardened.

"There's grown to be more to it lately than the hen end. Have you heard that sence Bat Reeves got let down by she that was Widder Snell"—he nodded toward the house—"he has been sort of caught on the bounce, as ye might say, by the Widder Pike? Well, bein' her close neighbor, I know it's so. And, furdermore, the widder's told my wife, bein' so tickled over ketchin' him that she couldn't hold it to herself. Now, for the last week, every time that old red-gilled dirt-walloper has led them hens into my garden, I've caught Bat Reeves peekin' around the corner of the widder's house watchin' 'em. If there's any such thing as a man bein' able to talk human language to a rooster, and put sin and Satan into him, Reeves is doin' it. But what's the good of my goin' and lickin' him? It'll mean law. That's what he's lookin' for—and him with that old gandershanked lawyer for a brother! See what they done to you!"

Hiram's eyes grew hard, and he muttered irefully. For cuffing Batson Reeves off the Widow Snell's door-step he had paid a fat fine, assessed for the benefit of the assaulted, along with liberal costs allowed to Squire Alcander Reeves.

"They can't get any of my money that way," pursued the Cap'n. "I'd pay suthin' for the privilege of drawin' and quarterin' him, but a plain lickin' ain't much object. A lickin' does him good."

"And it's so much ready money for that skunk," added the showman. He cocked his head to one side to avoid his cigar smoke, and stared down on P.T. pecking the last scraps of raw liver from the saucer.

"I understand you to say, do I," resumed Hiram, "that he is shooing them hens—or, at least, condonin' their comin' down into your garden ev'ry day?"

"I run full half a mile jest before I came acrost to see you, chasin' 'em out," said the Cap'n, gloomily, "and I'll bet they was back in there before I got to the first bars on my way over here."

P.T., feeling the stimulus of the liver, crooked his neck and crowed spiritedly. Then he scratched the side of his head with one toe, shook himself, and squatted down contentedly in the sun.

"In the show business," said Hiram, "when I found a feller with a game that I could play better 'n him, I was always willin' to play his game." He stuck up his hand with the fingers spread like a fan, and began to check items. "A gun won't do, because it's a widder's hens; a fight won't do, because it's Bat Reeves; law won't do, because he's got old heron-legged Alcander right in his family. Now this thing is gittin' onto your sperits, and I can see it!"

"It is heiferin' me bad," admitted the Cap'n. "It ain't so much the hens—though Gawd knows I hate a hen bad enough—but it's Bat Reeves standin' up there grinnin' and watchin' me play tag-you're-it with Old Scuff-and-kick and them female friends of his. For a man that's dreamed of garden-truck jest as he wants it, and never had veg'tables enough in twenty years of sloshin' round the world on shipboard, it's about the most cussed, aggravatin' thing I ever got against. And there I am! Swear and chase—and northin' comin' of it!"

Hiram clenched his cigar more firmly in his teeth, leaned over carefully, and picked up the recumbent P.T.

He tucked the rooster under his arm and started off.

"Let's go 'crost back lots," he advised. "What people don't see and don't know about won't hurt 'em, and that includes your wife and mine.

"It won't be no kind of a hen-fight, you understand," Hiram chatted as they walked, "'cause that compost-heap scratcher won't last so long as old Brown stayed in heaven. For P.T., here, it will be jest bristle, shuffle, one, two—brad through each eye, and—'Cock-a-doodle-doo!' All over! But it will give you a chance to see some of his leg-work, and a touch or two of his fancy spurrin'—and then you can take old Sculch-scratcher by the legs and hold him up and inform Bat Reeves that he can come and claim property. It's his own game—and we're playin' it! There ain't any chance for law where one rooster comes over into another rooster's yard and gets done up. Moral: Keep roosters in where the lightnin' won't strike 'em."

When they topped Hickory Hill they had a survey of Cap'n Sproul's acres. Here and there on the brown mould of his garden behind the big barn were scattered yellow and gray specks.

"There they be, blast 'em to fury!" growled the Cap'n.

His eyes then wandered farther, as though seeking something familiar, and he clutched the showman's arm as they walked along.

"And there's Bat Reeves's gray hoss hitched in the widder's dooryard."

"Mebbe he'll wait and have fricasseed rooster for dinner," suggested Hiram, grimly. "That's all his rooster'll be good for in fifteen minutes."

"It would be the devil and repeat for us if the widder's rooster should lick—and Bat Reeves standin' and lookin' on," suggested the Cap'n, bodingly.

Hiram stopped short, looked this faltering faint-heart all over from head to heel with withering scorn, and demanded: "Ain't you got sportin' blood enough to know the difference between a high-station game-cock and that old bow-legged Mormon down there scratchin' your garden-seeds?"

"Well," replied the Cap'n, rather surlily, "I ain't to blame for what I don't know about, and I don't know about hens, and I don't want to know. But I do know that he's more'n twice as big as your rooster, and he's had exercise enough in my garden this spring to be more'n twice as strong. All is, don't lay it to me not warnin' you, if you lose your thousand-dollar hen!"

"Don't you wear your voice out tryin' to tell me about my business in the hen-fightin' line," snapped the showman, fondly "huggling" P.T. more closely under his arm. "This is where size don't count. It's skill. There won't be enough to call it a scrap."

They made a detour through the Sproul orchard to avoid possible observation by Louada Murilla, the Cap'n's wife, and by so doing showed themselves plainly to any one who might be looking that way from the widow's premises. This was a part of the showman's plan. He hoped to attract Reeves's attention. He did. They saw him peering under his palm from the shed door, evidently suspecting that this combination of his two chief foes meant something sinister. He came out of the shed and walked down toward the fence when he saw them headed for the garden.

"Watchin' out for evidence in a law case, probably," growled Cap'n Sproul, the fear of onshore artfulness ever with him. "He'd ruther law it any time than have a fair fight, man to man, and that's the kind of a critter I hate."

"The widder's lookin' out of the kitchen winder," Hiram announced, "and I'm encouraged to think that mebbe he'll want to shine a little as her protector, and will come over into the garden to save her hen. Then will be your time. He'll be trespassin', and I'll be your witness. Go ahead and baste the stuffin' out of him."

He squatted down at the edge of the garden-patch, holding the impatient P.T. between his hands.

"Usually in a reg'lar match I scruffle his feathers and blow in his eye, Cap'n, but I won't have to do it this time. It's too easy a proposition. I'm jest tellin' you about it so that if you ever git interested in fightin' hens after this, you'll be thankful to me for a pointer or two."

"I won't begin to take lessons yet a while," the Cap'n grunted. "It ain't in my line."

Hiram tossed his feathered gladiator out upon the garden mould.

"S-s-s-s-! Eat him up, boy!" he commanded.

P.T. had his eye on the foe, but, with the true instinct of sporting blood, he would take no unfair advantage by stealthy advance on the preoccupied scratcher. He straddled, shook out his glossy ruff, and crowed shrilly.

The other rooster straightened up from his agricultural labors, and stared at this lone intruder on his family privacy. He was a tall, rakish-looking fowl, whose erect carriage and lack of tail-feathers made him look like a spindle-shanked urchin as he towered there among the busy hens.

In order that there might be no mistake as to his belligerent intentions, P.T. crowed again.

The other replied with a sort of croupy hoarseness.

"Sounds like he was full to the neck with your garden-seeds," commented Hiram. "Well, he won't ever eat no more, and that's something to be thankful for."

The game-cock, apparently having understood the word to come on, tiptoed briskly across the garden. The other waited his approach, craning his long neck and twisting his head from side to side.

Reeves was now at the fence.

"I'll bet ye ten dollars," shouted Hiram, "that down goes your hen the first shuffle."

"You will, hey?" bawled Reeves, sarcastically. "Say, you didn't bring them three shells and rubber pea that you used to make your livin' with, did ye?"

The old showman gasped, and his face grew purple. "I licked him twenty years ago for startin' that lie about me," he said, bending blazing glance on the Cap'n. "Damn the expense! I'm goin' over there and kill him!"

"Wait till your rooster kills his, and then take the remains and bat his brains out with 'em," advised the Cap'n, swelling with equal wrath. "Look! He's gettin' at him!"

P.T. put his head close to the ground, his ring of neck-feathers glistening in the sun, then darted forward, rising in air as he did so. The other rooster, who had been awaiting his approach, stiffly erect, ducked to one side, and the game-cock went hurtling past.

"Like rooster, like master!" Hiram yelled, savagely. "He's a coward. Why don't he run and git your brother, Alcander, to put P.T. under bonds to keep the peace? Yah-h-h-h! You're all cowards."

The game-cock, accustomed to meet the bravery of true champions of the pit, stood for a little while and stared at this shifty foe. He must have decided that he was dealing with a poltroon with whom science and prudence were not needed. He stuck out his neck and ran at Long-legs, evidently expecting that Long-legs would turn and flee in a panic. Long-legs jumped to let him pass under, and came down on the unwary P.T. with the crushing force of his double bulk. The splay feet flattened the game-cock to the ground, and, while he lay there helpless, this victor-by-a-fluke began to peck and tear at his head and comb in a most brutal and unsportsmanlike manner.

With a hoarse howl of rage and concern, Hiram rushed across the garden, the dirt flying behind him. The hens squawked and fled, and the conqueror, giving one startled look at the approaching vengeance, abandoned his victim, and closed the line of retreat over the fence.

"He didn't git at his eyes," shouted Hiram, grabbing up his champion from the dirt, "but"—making hasty survey of the bleeding head—"but the jeebingoed cannibal has et one gill and pretty near pecked his comb off. It wa'n't square! It wa'n't square!" he bellowed, advancing toward the fence where Reeves was leaning. "Ye tried to kill a thousand-dollar bird by a skin-game, and I'll have it out of your hide."

Reeves pulled a pole out of the fence.

"Don't ye come across here," he gritted. "I'll brain ye! It was your own rooster-fight. You put it up. You got licked. What's the matter with you?" A grin of pure satisfaction curled under his beard.

"You never heard of true sport. You don't know what it means. He stood on him and started to eat him. All he thinks of is eatin' up something. It wa'n't fair." Hiram caressed the bleeding head of P.T. with quivering hand.

"Fair!" sneered Reeves. "You're talkin' as though this was a prize-fight for the championship of the world! My—I mean, Mis' Pike's rooster licked, didn't he? Well, when a rooster's licked, he's licked, and there ain't nothin' more to it."

"That's your idee of sport, is it?" demanded Hiram, stooping to wipe his bloody hand on the grass.

"It's my idee of a rooster-fight," retorted Reeves. In his triumph he was not unwilling to banter repartee with the hateful Hiram. "You fellers with what you call sportin' blood"—he sneered the words—"come along and think nobody else can't do anything right but you. You fetch along cat-meat with feathers on it"—he pointed at the vanquished P.T.—"and expect it to stand any show with a real fighter." Now he pointed to the Widow Pike's rooster sauntering away with his harem about him. "He ain't rid' around with a circus nor followed the sportin' life, and he's al'ays lived in the country and minded his own business, but he's good for a whole crateful of your sportin' blooders—and so long as he licks, it don't make no difference how he does it."

The personal reference in this little speech was too plain for Hiram to disregard.

His hard eyes narrowed, and hatred of this insolent countryman blazed there. The countryman glared back with just as fierce bitterness.

"Mebbe you've got money to back your opinion of Widder Pike's hen there?" suggested the showman. "Money's the only thing that seems to interest you, and you don't seem to care how you make it."

Reeves glanced from the maimed P.T., gasping on Hiram's arm, to the victorious champion who had defeated this redoubtable bird so easily. His Yankee shrewdness told him that the showman had undoubtedly produced his best for this conflict; his Yankee cupidity hinted that by taking advantage of Hiram's present flustered state of mind he might turn a dollar. He glanced from Hiram to Cap'n Sproul, standing at one side, and said with careless superiority:

"Make your talk!"

"I've got five hundred that says I've got the best hen."

"There ain't goin' to be no foolishness about rules and sport, and hitchin' and hawin', is there? It's jest hen that counts!"

"Jest hen!" Hiram set his teeth hard.

"Five hundred it is," agreed Reeves. "But I need a fortni't to collect in some that's due me. Farmin' ain't such ready-money as the circus bus'ness."

"Take your fortni't! And we'll settle place later. And that's all, 'cause it makes me sick to stand anywhere within ten feet of you."

Hiram strode away across the fields, his wounded gladiator on his arm.

And, as it was near dinner-time, Cap'n Sproul trudged into his own house, his mien thoughtful and his air subdued.

On his next visit to Hiram, the Cap'n didn't know which was the most preoccupied—the showman sitting in the barn door at Imogene's feet, or the battered P.T. propped disconsolately on one leg. Both were gazing at the ground with far-away stare, and Hiram was not much more conversational than the rooster.

The next day Hiram drove into the Sproul dooryard and called out the Cap'n, refusing to get out of his wagon.

"I shall be away a few days—mebbe more, mebbe less. I leave time and place to you." And he slashed at his horse and drove away.

It was certainly a queer place that Cap'n Sproul decided upon after several days of rumination. His own abstraction during that time, and the unexplained absence of Hiram, the bridegroom of a month, an absence that was prolonged into a week, caused secret tears and apprehensive imaginings in both households.

Hiram came back, mysterious as the Sphinx.

Cap'n Sproul arranged for a secret meeting of the principals behind his barn, and announced his decision as to place.

"The poor-farm!" both snorted in unison. "What—"

"Hold right on!" interrupted the Cap'n, holding up his broad palms; "it can't be in his barn on account of his wife; it can't be in my barn on account of my wife. Both of 'em are all wrought up and suspectin' somethin'. Some old pick-ed nose in this place is bound to see us if we try to sneak away into the woods. Jim Wixon, the poor-farm keeper, holds his job through me. He's square, straight, and minds his own business. I can depend on him. He'll hold the stakes. There ain't another man in town we can trust. There ain't a place as safe as the poor-farm barn. Folks don't go hangin' round a poor-farm unless they have to. It's for there the ev'nin' before the Fourth. Agree, or count me out. The first selectman of this town can't afford to take too many chances, aidin' and abettin' a hen-fight."

Therefore there was nothing else for it. The principals accepted sullenly, and went their ways.

The taciturnity of Hiram Look was such during the few days before the meeting that Cap'n Sproul regretfully concluded to keep to his own hearthstone. Hiram seemed to be nursing a secret. The Cap'n felt hurt, and admitted as much to himself in his musings.

He went alone to the rendezvous at early dusk. Keeper Wixon, of the poor-farm, had the big floor of the barn nicely swept, had hung lanterns about on the wooden harness-pegs, and was in a state of great excitement and impatience.

Second Selectman Reeves came first, lugging his crate from his beach-wagon. The crate held the Widow Pike's rooster. His nomination had his head up between the slats, and was crowing regularly and raucously.

"Choke that dam fog-horn off!" commanded the Cap'n. "What are ye tryin' to do, advertise this sociable?"

"You talk like I was doin' that crowin' myself," returned Reeves, sulkily. "And nobody ain't goin' to squat his wizen and git him out of breath. Hands off, and a fair show!"

Hiram Look was no laggard at the meeting. He rumbled into the yard on the box of one of his animal cages, pulled out a huge bag containing something that kicked and wriggled, and deposited his burden on the barn floor.

"Now," said he, brusquely, "business before pleasure! You've got the stakes, eh, Wixon?"

"In my wallet here—a thousand dollars," replied the keeper, a little catch in his voice at thought of the fortune next his anxious heart.

"And the best hen takes the money; no flummery, no filigree!" put in Reeves.

Hiram was kneeling beside his agitated bag, and was picking at the knots in its fastening. "This will be a hen-fight served up Smyrna style," he said, grimly. "And, as near as I can find out, that style is mostly—scrambled!"

"I've got a favor to ask," stammered Wixon, hesitatingly. "It don't mean much to you, but it means a good deal to others. Bein' penned up on a poor-farm, with nothin' except three meals a day to take up your mind, is pretty tough on them as have seen better days. I'll leave it to Cap'n Sproul, here, if I ain't tried to put a little kindness and human feelin' into runnin' this place, and—"

Hiram was untying the last knot. "Spit out what you're drivin' at," he cried bluntly; "this ain't no time for sideshow barkin'. The big show is about to begin."

"I want to invite in the boys," blurted Wixon. And when they blinked at him amazedly, he said:

"The five old fellers that's here, I mean. They're safe and mum, and they're jest dyin' for a little entertainment, and it's only kindness to them that's unfortunate, if you—"

"What do you think this is, a livin'-picture show got up to amuse a set of droolin' old paupers?" demanded Hiram, with heat.

"Well, as it is, they suspect suthin'," persisted Wixon. "All they have to do to pass time is to suspect and projick on what's goin' on and what's goin' to happen. If you'll let me bring 'em, I can shet their mouths. If they don't come in, they're goin' to suspect suthin' worse than what it is—and that's only human natur'—and not to blame for it."

The two selectmen protested, official alarm in their faces, but Hiram suddenly took the keeper's side, after the manner of his impetuous nature, and after he had shrewdly noted that Reeves seemed to be most alarmed.

"I'm the challenger," he roared. "I've got something to say. Bring 'em, Wixon. Let 'em have a taste of fun. I may wind up on the poor-farm myself. Bring 'em in. There's prob'ly more sportin' blood in the paupers of this town than in the citizens. Bring 'em in, and let's have talkin' done with."

In a suspiciously short time Wixon led in his charges—five hobbling old men, all chewing tobacco and looking wondrously interested.

"There!" said Hiram, an appreciative glint in his eyes. "Nothin' like havin' an audience, even if they did come in on passes. I've never given a show before empty benches yet. And now, gents"—the old spirit of the "barker" entered into him—"you are about to behold a moral and elevatin' exhibition of the wonders of natur'. I have explored the jungles of Palermo, the hills of Peru Corners, the valleys of North Belgrade, never mindin' time and expense, and I've got something that beats the wild boy Tom and his little sister Mary. Without takin' more of your valuable time, I will now present to your attention"—he tore open the bag—"Cap'n Kidd, the Terror of the Mountains."

The wagging jaws of the old paupers stopped as if petrified. Keeper Wixon peered under his hand and retreated a few paces. Even doughty Cap'n Sproul, accustomed to the marvels of land and sea, snapped his eyes. As for Reeves, he gasped "Great gorlemity!" under his breath, and sat down on the edge of his crate, as though his legs had given out.

The creature that rose solemnly up from the billowing folds of the bagging had a head as smooth and round as a door-knob, dangling, purple wattles under its bill, and breast of a sanguinary red, picked clean of feathers. There were not many feathers on the fowl, anyway. Its tail was merely a spreading of quills like spikes. It was propped on legs like stilts, and when it stretched to crow it stood up as tall as a yard-stick.

"Let out your old doostrabulus, there!" Hiram commanded.

"That ain't no hen," wailed his adversary.

"It's got two legs, a bill, and a place for tail-feathers, and that's near enough to a hen for fightin' purposes in this town—accordin' to what I've seen of the sport here," insisted the showman. "The principal hen-fightin' science in Smyrna seems to be to stand on t' other hen and peck him to pieces! Well, Reeves, Cap'n Kidd there ain't got so much pedigree as some I've owned, but as a stander and pecker I'm thinkin' he'll give a good, fair account of himself."

"It's a gum-game," protested Reeves, agitatedly, "and I ain't goin' to fight no ostrich nor hen-hawk."

"Then I'll take the stakes without further wear or tear," said Hiram. "Am I right, boys?" A unanimous chorus indorsed him. "And this here is something that I reckon ye won't go to law about," the showman went on, ominously, "even if you have got a lawyer in the family. You ketch, don't you?"

The unhappy second selectman realized his situation, sighed, and pried a slat off the crate. His nomination was more sanguine than he. The rooster hopped upon the crate, crowed, and stalked out onto the barn floor with a confidence that made Reeves perk up courage a bit.

Cap'n Kidd showed abstraction rather than zeal. He was busily engaged in squinting along his warty legs, and at last detected two or three objects that were annoying him. He picked them off leisurely. Then he ran his stiff and scratchy wing down his leg, yawned, and seemed bored.

When the other rooster ran across and pecked him viciously on his red expanse of breast, he cocked his head sideways and looked down wonderingly on this rude assailant. Blood trickled from the wound, and Reeves giggled nervously. Cap'n Sproul muttered something and looked apprehensive, but Hiram, his eyes hard and his lips set, crouched at the side of the floor, and seemed to be waiting confidently.

Widow Pike's favorite stepped back, rapped his bill on the floor several times, and then ran at his foe once more. A second trail of blood followed his blow. This time the unknown ducked his knobby head at the attacker. It looked like a blow with a slung-shot. But it missed, and Reeves tittered again.

"Fly up and peck his eye out, Pete!" he called, cheerily.

It is not likely that Peter understood this adjuration, notwithstanding Cap'n Sproul's gloomy convictions on that score in the past. But, apparently having tested the courage of this enemy, he changed his tactics, leaped, and flew at Cap'n Kidd with spurring feet.

Then it happened!

It happened almost before the little group of spectators could gasp.

Cap'n Kidd threw himself back on the bristling spines of his tail, both claws off the floor. Peter's spurring feet met only empty air, and he fell on the foe.

Foe's splay claws grabbed him around the neck and clutched him like a vise, shutting off his last, startled squawk. Then Cap'n Kidd darted forward that knobby head with its ugly beak, and tore off Peter's caput with one mighty wrench.

"'Tain't fair! It's jest as I said it was! 'Tain't square!" screamed Reeves.

But Hiram strode forward, snapping authoritative fingers under Wixon's nose. "Hand me that money!" he gritted, and Wixon, his eyes on the unhappy bird writhing in Cap'n Kidd's wicked grasp, made no demur. The showman took it, even as the maddened Reeves was clutching for the packet, tucked it into his breast pocket, and drove the second selectman back with a mighty thrust of his arm. The selectman stumbled over the combatants and sat down with a shock that clicked his teeth. Cap'n Kidd fled from under, and flew to a high beam.

"He ain't a hen!" squalled Reeves.

At that moment the barn door was opened from the outside, and through this exit Cap'n Kidd flapped with hoarse cries, whether of triumph or fright no one could say.

The lanterns' light shone on Widow Sidenia Pike, her face white from the scare "Cap'n Kidd's" rush past her head had given her, but with determination written large in her features.

She gazed long at Reeves, sitting on the floor beside the defunct rooster. She pointed an accusatory finger at it.

"Mr. Reeves," she said, "you've been lyin' to me two weeks, tryin' to buy that rooster that I wouldn't sell no more'n I'd sell my first husband's gravestun'. And when you couldn't git it by lyin', you stole it off'm the roost to-night. And to make sure there won't be any more lies, I've followed you right here to find out the truth. Now what does this mean?"

There was a soulful pause.

"Lie in small things, lie in big!" she snapped. "I reckon I've found ye out for a missabul thing!"

Hiram, standing back in the shadows, nudged Cap'n Sproul beside him, and wagged his head toward the open door. They went out on tiptoe.

"If he wants to lie some more, our bein' round might embarrass him," whispered Hiram. "I never like to embarrass a man when he's down—and—and her eyes was so much on Reeves and the rooster I don't believe she noticed us. And what she don't know won't hurt her none. But"—he yawned—"I shouldn't be a mite surprised if another one of Bat Reeves's engagements was busted in this town. He don't seem to have no luck at all in marryin' farms with the wimmen throwed in." The Cap'n didn't appear interested in Reeves's troubles. His eyes were searching the dim heavens.

"What do you call that thing you brought in the bag?" he demanded.

"Blamed if I know!" confessed Hiram, climbing upon his chariot. "And I'm pretty well up on freaks, too, as a circus man ought to be. I jest went out huntin' for suthin' to fit in with the sportin' blood as I found it in this place—and I reckon I got it! Mebbe 'twas a cassowary, mebbe 'twas a dodo—the man himself didn't know—said even the hen that hatched it didn't seem to know. 'Pologized to me for asking me two dollars for it, and I gave him five. I hope it will go back where it come from. It hurt my eyes to look at it. But it was a good bargain!" He patted his breast pocket.

"Come over to-morrow," he called to the Cap'n as he drove away. "I sha'n't have so much on my mind, and I'll be a little more sociable! Listen to that bagpipe selection!"

Behind them they heard the whining drone of a man's pleading voice and a woman's shrill, insistent tones, a monotony of sound flowing on—and on—and on!

The president of the "Smyrna Agricultural Fair and Gents' Driving Association" had been carrying something on his mind throughout the meeting of the trustees of the society—the last meeting before the date advertised for the fair. And now, not without a bit of apprehensiveness, he let it out.

"I've invited the Honer'ble J. Percival Bickford to act as the starter and one of the judges of the races," he announced.

Trustee Silas Wallace, superintendent of horses, had put on his hat. Now he took it off again.

"What!" he almost squalled.

"You see," explained the president, with eager conciliatoriness, "we've only got to scratch his back just a little to have him—"

"Why, 'Kittle-belly' Bickford don't know no more about hoss-trottin' than a goose knows about the hard-shell Baptist doctrine," raved Wallace, his little eyes popping like marbles.

"I don't like to hear a man that's done so much for his native town called by any such names," retorted the president, ready to show temper himself, to hide his embarrassment. "He's come back here and—"

Trustee Wallace now stood up and cracked his bony knuckles on the table, his weazened face puckered with angry ridges.

"I don't need to have a printed catalogue of what Jabe Bickford has done for this town. And I don't need to be told what he's done it for. He's come back from out West, where he stole more money than he knew what to do with, and—"

"I protest!" cried President Thurlow Kitchen. "When you say that the Honer'ble J. Percival Bickford has stolen—"

"Well, promoted gold-mines, then! It's only more words to say the same thing. And he's back here spendin' his loose change for daily doses of hair-oil talk fetched to him by the beggin' old suckers of this place."

"I may be a beggin' old sucker," flared the president, "but I've had enterprise enough and interest in this fair enough to get Mr. Bickford to promise us a present of a new exhibition hall, and it's only right to extend some courtesy to him in return."

"It was all right to make him president of the lib'ry association when he built the lib'ry, make him a deacon when he gave the organ for the meetin'-house, give him a banquet and nineteen speeches tellin' him he was the biggest man on earth when he put the stone watering-trough in—all that was all right for them that thought it was all right. But when you let 'Kittle-belly' Bickford—"

"Don't you call him that," roared President Kitchen, thumping the table.

"Duke, then! Dammit, crown him lord of all! But when you let him hang that pod of his out over the rail of that judges' stand and bust up a hoss-trot programmy that I've been three months gettin' entries for—and all jest so he can show off a white vest and a plug hat and a new gold stop-watch and have the band play 'Hail to the Chief'—I don't stand for it—no, sir!"

"The trouble is with you," retorted the president with spirit, "you've razoo-ed and hoss-jockeyed so long you've got the idea that all there is to a fair is a plug of chaw-tobacco, a bag of peanuts, and a posse of nose-whistlin' old pelters skatin' round a half-mile track."

"And you and 'Kit'—you and Duke Jabe, leave you alone to run a fair—wouldn't have northin' but his new exhibition hall filled with croshayed tidies and hooked rugs."

"Well, I move," broke in Trustee Dunham, "that we git som'ers. I'm personally in favor of pleasin' Honer'ble Bickford and takin' the exhibition hall."

"That's right! That's business!" came decisive chorus from the other three trustees. "Let's take the hall."

Wallace doubled his gaunt form, propped himself on the table by his skinny arms, and stared from face to face in disgust unutterable.

"Take it?" he sneered. "Why, you'll take anything! You're takin' up the air in this room, like pumpin' up a sulky tire, and ain't lettin' it out again! Good-day! I'm goin' out where I can get a full breath."

He whirled on them at the door.

"But you hark to what I'm predictin' to you! If you don't wish the devil had ye before you're done with that old balloon with a plug hat on it in your judges' stand, then I'll trot an exhibition half mile on my hands and knees against Star Pointer for a bag of oats. And I'm speakin' for all the hossmen in this county."

When this uncomfortable Jeremiah had departed, leaving in his wake a trailing of oaths and a bouquet of stable aroma, the trustees showed relief, even if enthusiasm was notably absent.

"It's going to raise the tone of the fair, having him in the stand—there ain't any getting round that," said the president. "The notion seemed to strike him mighty favorable. 'It's an idea!' said he to me. 'Yes, a real idea. I will have other prominent gentlemen to serve with me, and we will be announced as paytrons of the races. That will sound well, I think.' And he asked me what two men in town was best fixed financially, and, of course, I told him Cap'n Aaron Sproul, our first selectman, and Hiram Look. He said he hadn't been in town long enough to get real well acquainted with either of them yet, but hoped they were gentlemen. I told him they were. I reckon that being skipper of a ship and ownin' a circus stands as high as the gold-mine business."

"Well," said one of the trustees, with some venom, "Jabe Bickford is doin' a good deal for this town, one way and another, but he wants to remember that his gran'ther had to call on us for town aid, and that there wa'n't nary ever another Bickford that lived in this town or went out of it, except Jabe, that could get trusted for a barrel of flour. Puttin' on his airs out West is all right, but puttin' 'em on here to home, among us that knows him and all his breed, is makin' some of the old residents kind of sick. Si Wallace hadn't ought to call him by that name he did, but Si is talkin' the way a good many feel."

"If an angel from heaven should descend on this town with the gift of abidin' grace," said President Kitchen, sarcastically, "a lot of folks here would get behind his back and make faces at him."

"Prob'ly would," returned the trustee, imperturbably, "if said angel wore a plug hat and kid gloves from mornin' till night, said 'Me good man' to old codgers who knowed him when he had stone-bruises on his heels as big as pigeon's aigs, and otherwise acted as though he was cream and every one else was buttermilk."

"Well, when some of the rest of you have done as much for this town as Honer'ble Bickford," broke in the president, testily, "you can have the right to criticise. As it is, I can't see anything but jealousy in it. And I've heard enough of it. Now, to make this thing all pleasant and agreeable to the Honer'ble Bickford, we've got to have Cap'n Sproul and Hiram Look act as judges with him. 'Tis a vote! Now, who will see Cap'n Sproul and—"

"Considerin' what has happened to those who have in times past tried to notify Cap'n Sproul of honors tendered to him in this town, you'd better pick out some one who knows how to use the wireless telegraph," suggested one of the trustees.

"There won't be any trouble in gettin' Hiram Look to act," said the president. "He's just enough of a circus feller to like to stand up before the crowd and show authority. Well, then"—the president's wits were sharpened by his anxiety over the proposed exhibition hall—"let Mr. Look arrange it with Cap'n Sproul. They're suckin' cider through the same straw these days."

And this suggestion was so eminently good that the meeting adjourned in excellent humor that made light of all the gloomy prognostications of Trustee Wallace.

As though good-fortune were in sooth ruling the affairs of the Smyrna A.F. & G.D.A., Hiram Look came driving past as the trustees came out of the tavern, their meeting-place.

He stroked his long mustache and listened. At first his silk hat stuck up rigidly, but soon it began to nod gratified assent.

"I don't know much about hoss-trottin' rules, but a man that's been in the show business for thirty years has got enough sportin' blood in him for the job, I reckon. Bickford and Sproul, hey? Why, yes! I'll hunt up the Cap, and take him over to Bickford's, and we'll settle preliminaries, or whatever the hoss-talk is for gettin' together. I'd rather referee a prize-fight, but you're too dead up this way for real sport to take well. Nothing been said to Sproul? All right! I'll fix him."

Cap'n Sproul was in his garden, surveying the growing "sass" with much content of spirit. He cheerfully accepted Hiram's invitation to take a ride, destination not mentioned, and they jogged away toward "Bickburn Towers," as the Honorable J. Percival had named the remodelled farm-house of his ancestors.

Hiram, whose gift was language, impetuous in flow and convincing in argument, whether as barker or friend, conveyed the message of the trustees to Cap'n Sproul. But the first selectman of Smyrna did not display enthusiasm. He scowled at the buggy dasher and was silent.

"Men that have been out and about, like you and I have been, need something once in a while to break the monotony of country life," concluded Hiram, slashing his whip at the wayside alders.

"You and me and him," observed the Cap'n, with sullen prod of his thumb in direction of the "gingerbready" tower of the Bickford place rising over the ridge, "marooned in that judges' stand like penguins on a ledge—we'll be li'ble to break the monotony. Oh yes! There ain't no doubt about that."

"Why, there'll be northin' to it!" blustered Hiram, encouragingly. "I'll swear 'em into line, you holler 'Go!' and the Honer'ble Bickford will finger that new gold stop-watch of his and see how fast they do it. Northin' to it, I say!"

"This is the blastedest town a man ever settled down in to spend his last days in peace and quietness," growled the Cap'n. "There's a set of men here that seem to be perfickly happy so long as they're rollin' up a gob of trouble, sloppin' a little sweet-oil and molasses on the outside and foolin' some one into swallerin' it. I tell ye, Look, I've lived here a little longer than you have, and when you see a man comin' to offer you what they call an honor, kick him on general principles, and kick him hard."

"Doctors ought to be willin' to take their own medicine," retorted Hiram, grimly. "Here you be, first selec'man and—"

"They caught me when I wa'n't lookin'—not bein' used to the ways of land-piruts," replied the Cap'n, gloomily. "I was tryin' to warn you as one that's been ahead and knows."

"Why, that's just what I like about this town," blurted Hiram, undismayed. "When I came home to Palermo a year ago or so, after all my wanderin's, they wouldn't elect me so much as hog-reeve—seemed to be down on me all 'round. But here—heard what they did last night?" There was pride in his tones. "They elected me foreman of the Smyrna Ancient and Honer'ble Firemen's Association."

"And you let 'em hornswoggle you into takin' it?" demanded the Cap'n.

"Leather buckets, piazzy hat, speakin'-trumpet, bed-wrench, and puckerin'-string bag are in my front hall this minit," said Hiram, cheerily, "and the wife is gittin' the stuff together for the feed and blow-out next week. I'm goin' to do it up brown!"

The Cap'n opened his mouth as though to enter upon revelations. But he shut it without a word.

"It ain't no use," he reflected, his mind bitter with the memories of his own occupancy of that office. "It's like the smallpox and the measles; you've got to have a run of 'em yourself before you're safe from ketchin' 'em."

The Honorable J. Percival Bickford, rotund and suave with the mushiness of the near-gentleman, met them graciously in the hall, having waited for the servant to announce them.

Hiram did most of the talking, puffing at one of the host's long cigars. Cap'n Sproul sat on the edge of a spider-legged chair, great unhappiness on his countenance. Mr. Bickford was both charmed and delighted, so he said, by their acceptance, and made it known that he had suggested them, in his anxiety to have only gentlemen of standing associated with him.

"As the landed proprietors of the town, as you might say," he observed, "it becomes us as due our position to remove ourselves a little from the herd. In the judges' stand we can, as you might say, be patrons of the sports of the day, without loss of dignity. I believe—and this is also my suggestion—that the trustees are to provide an open barouche, and we will be escorted from the gate to the stand by a band of music. That will be nice. And when it is over we will award the prizes, as I believe they call it—"

"Announce winners of heats and division of purses," corrected Hiram, out of his greater knowledge of sporting affairs. "I'll do that through a megaphone. When I barked in front of my show you could hear me a mile."

"It will all be very nice," said Mr. Bickford, daintily flecking cigar ash from his glorious white waistcoat. "Er—by the way—I see that you customarily wear a silk hat, Mr. Look."

"It needs a plug hat, a lemon, and a hunk of glass to run a circus," said the ex-showman.

"Yes, men may say what they like, Mr. Look, the people expect certain things in the way of garb from those whom they honor with position. Er—do you wear a silk hat officially, Captain Sproul, as selectman?"

"Not by a—never had one of the things on!" replied the Cap'n, moderating his first indignant outburst.

"I'm going to do you a bit of neighborly kindness," said Mr. Bickford, blandly. "James," he called to the servant, "bring the brown bandbox in the hall closet. It's one of my hats," he explained. "I have several. You may wear it in the stand, with my compliments, Captain Sproul. Then we'll be three of a kind, eh? Ha, ha!"

The Cap'n licked his lips as though fever burned there, and worked his Adam's apple vigorously. Probably if he had been in the accustomed freedom of outdoors he would have sworn soulfully and smashed the bandbox over the Honorable J. Percival's bald head. Now, in the stilted confines of that ornate parlor, he nursed the bandbox on his knees, as part of the rest of the spider-legged and frail surroundings. When they retired to their team he carried the bandbox held gingerly out in front of him, tiptoeing across the polished floor.

"What? Me wear that bird-cage?" he roared, when they were out of hearing. "Not by the great jeehookibus!"

"Yes, you will," returned Hiram, with the calm insistence of a friend. "You ain't tryin' to make out that what I do ain't all right and proper, are you?"

Cap'n Sproul checked an apparent impulse to toss the bandbox into the roadside bushes, and after a moment tucked the thing under the seat to have it out of the way of his tempted hands. Then he wrenched off a huge chew of tobacco whose rumination might check his impulse toward tempestuous language.

He tried the hat on that night in the presence of his admiring wife, gritting curses under his breath, his skin prickling with resentment. He swore then that he would never wear it. But on the day of the race he carried it in its box to the selectman's office, at which common meeting-place the three judges were to be taken up by the official barouche of the Smyrna Fair Association.

Under the commanding eye of Hiram Look he put on the head-gear when the barouche was announced at the door, and went forth into the glare of publicity with a furtive sense of shame that flushed his cheek. By splitting the top of his hack, Ferd Parrott, landlord of Smyrna tavern, had produced a vehicle that somewhat resembled half a watermelon. Ferd drove, adorned also with a plug hat from the stock of the Honorable Percival.

Just inside the gate of the fair-grounds waited the Smyrna "Silver Cornet Band." It struck up "Hail to the Chief," to the violent alarm of the hack-horses.

"We're goin' to get run away with sure's you're above hatches!" bellowed Cap'n Sproul, standing up and making ready to leap over the edge of the watermelon. But Hiram Look restrained him, and the band, its trombones splitting the atmosphere, led away with a merry march.

When they had circled the track, from the three-quarters pole to the stand, and the crowd broke into plaudits, Cap'n Sproul felt a bit more comfortable, and dared to straighten his neck and lift his head-gear further into the sunshine.

He even forgot the hateful presence of his seat-mate, a huge dog that Mr. Bickford had invited into the fourth place in the carriage.

"A very valuable animal, gentlemen," he said. "Intelligent as a man, and my constant companion. To-day is the day of two of man's best friends—the horse and the dog—and Hector will be in his element."

But Hector, wagging and slavering amiably about in the narrow confines of the little stand to which they climbed, snapped the Cap'n's leash of self-control ere five minutes passed.

"Say, Mr. Bickford," he growled, after one or two efforts to crowd past the ubiquitous canine and get to the rail, "either me or your dog is in the way here."

"Charge, Hector!" commanded Mr. Bickford, taking one eye from the cheering multitude. The dog "clumped" down reluctantly.

"We might just as well get to an understandin'," said the Cap'n, not yet placated. "I ain't used to a dog underfoot, I don't like a dog, and I won't associate with a dog. Next thing I know I'll be makin' a misstep onto him, and he'll have a hunk out of me."

"Why, my dear captain," oozed Hector's proprietor, "that dog is as intelligent as a man, as mild as a kitten, and a very—"

"Don't care if he's writ a dictionary and nussed infants," cried the Cap'n, slatting out his arm defiantly; "it's him or me, here; take your choice!"

"I—I think your dog would be all right if you let him stay down-stairs under the stand," ventured President Kitchen, diplomatically.

"He's a valuable animal," demurred Mr. Bickford, "and—" He caught the flaming eye of the Cap'n, and added: "But if you'll have a man sit with him he may go.

"Now we'll settle down for a real nice afternoon," he went on, conciliatingly. "Let's see: This here is the cord that I pull to signal the horses to start, is it?"

"No, no!" expostulated President Kitchen, "you pull that bell-cord to call them back if the field isn't bunched all right at the wire when they score down for the word. If all the horses are in position and are all leveled, you shout 'Go!' and start your watch."

"Precisely," said Mr. Bickford.

"It's the custom," went on the president, solicitous for the success of his strange assortment of judges, yet with heart almost failing him, "for each judge to have certain horses that he watches during the mile for breaks or fouls. Then he places them as they come under the wire. That is so one man won't have too much on his mind."

"Very, very nice!" murmured the Honorable J. Percival. "We are here to enjoy the beautiful day and the music and the happy throngs, and we don't want to be too much taken up with our duties." He pushed himself well out into view over the rail, held his new gold watch in one gloved hand, and tapped time to the band with the other.

A narrow flight of rickety, dusty stairs conducted one from the dim, lower region of the little stand through an opening in the floor of the judge's aerie. There was a drop-door over the opening, held up by a hasp.

Now came a thumping of resolute feet on the stairs; a head projected just above the edge of the opening, and stopped there.

"President, trustees, and judges!" hailed a squeaky voice.

Cap'n Sproul recognized the speaker with an uncontrollable snort of disgust.

It was Marengo Todd, most obnoxious of all that hateful crowd of the Cap'n's "wife's relations"—the man who had misused the Cap'n's honeymoon guilelessness in order to borrow money and sell him spavined horses.

Marengo surveyed them gloomily from under a driving-cap visor huge as a sugar-scoop. He flourished at them a grimy sheet of paper.

"Mister President, trustees, and judges, I've got here a dockyment signed by seventeen—"

President Kitchen knew that Marengo Todd had been running his bow-legs off all the forenoon securing signatures to a petition of protest that had been inspired by Trustee Silas Wallace. The president pushed away the hand that brandished the paper.

"What do you take this for—an afternoon readin'-circle?" he demanded. "If you're goin' to start your hoss in this thirty-four class you want to get harnessed. We're here to trot hosses, not to peruse dockyments."

"This 'ere ain't no pome on spring," yelled Marengo, banging the dust out of the floor with his whip-butt and courageously coming up one step on the stairs. "It's a protest, signed by seventeen drivers, and says if you start these events with them three old sofy pillers, there, stuffed into plug hats, for judges, we'll take this thing clear up to the Nayshunal 'Sociation and show up this fair management. There, chaw on that!"

"Why, bless my soul!" chirruped the Honorable Bickford, "this man seems very much excited. You'll have to run away, my good man! We're very busy up here, and have no time to subscribe to any papers."

Mr. Bickford evidently believed that this was one of the daily "touches" to which he had become accustomed.

"Don't ye talk to me like I was one of your salaried spittoon-cleaners," squealed Marengo, emboldened by the hoarse and encouraging whispers of Trustee Wallace in the dim depths below. The name that much repetition by Wallace had made familiar slipped out before he had time for second thought. "I knowed ye, Kittle-belly Bickford, when ye wore patches on your pants bigger'n dinner-plates and—"

President Kitchen let loose the hasp that held up the drop-door and fairly "pegged" Mr. Todd out of sight. He grinned apologetically at a furious Mr. Bickford.

"Order the marshal to call the hosses for the thirty-four trot, Honer'ble," he directed, anxious to give the starter something to do to take his mind off present matters.

Mr. Bickford obeyed, finding this exercise of authority a partial sop to his wounded feelings.

Cap'n Sproul pendulumed dispiritedly to and fro in the little enclosure, gloomily and obstinately waiting for the disaster that his seaman's sense of impending trouble scented. Hiram Look was frankly and joyously enjoying a scene that revived his old circus memories.

Eleven starters finally appeared, mostly green horses. The drivers were sullen and resentful. Marengo Todd was up behind a Gothic ruin that he called "Maria M." When he jogged past the judges' stand to get position, elbows on his knees and shoulders hunched up, the glare that he levelled on Bickford from under his scoop visor was absolutely demoniac. The mutter of his denunciation could be heard above the yells of the fakers and the squawk of penny whistles.

Occasionally he scruffed his forearm over his head as though fondling something that hurt him.

To start those eleven rank brutes on that cow-lane of a track would have tested the resources and language of a professional. When they swung at the foot of the stretch and came scoring for the first time it was a mix-up that excited the vociferous derision of the crowd. Nearly every horse was off his stride, the drivers sawing at the bits.

Marengo Todd had drawn the pole, but by delaying, in order to blast the Honorable J. Percival with his glances, he was not down to turn with the others, and now came pelting a dozen lengths behind, howling like a Modoc.

Some railbird satirist near the wire bawled "Go!" as the unspeakable riot swept past in dust-clouds. The Honorable Bickford had early possessed himself of the bell-cord as his inalienable privilege. He did not ring the bell to call the field back. He merely leaned far out, clutching the cord, endeavoring to get his eye on the man who had shouted "Go!" He declaimed above the uproar that the man who would do such a thing as that was no gentleman, and declared that he should certainly have a constable arrest the next man who interfered with his duties.

In the mean time President Kitchen was frantically calling to him to ring the gong. The horses kept going, for a driver takes no chances of losing a heat by coming back to ask questions. It was different in the case of Marengo Todd, driver of the pole-horse, and entitled to "protection." He pulled "Maria M." to a snorting halt under the wire and poured forth the vials of his artistic profanity in a way that piqued Cap'n Sproul's professional interest, he having heard more or less eminent efforts in his days of seafaring.

Lashed in this manner, the Honorable J. Percival Bickford began retort of a nature that reminded his fellow-townsmen that he was "Jabe" Bickford, of Smyrna, before he was donor of public benefits and libraries.

The grimness of Cap'n Sproul's face relaxed a little. He forgot even the incubus of the plug hat. He nudged Hiram.

"I didn't know he had it in him," he whispered. "I was afraid he was jest a dude and northin' else."

In this instance the dog Hector seemed to know his master's voice, and realized that something untoward was occurring. He came bounding out from under the stand and frisked backward toward the centre of the track in order to get a square look at his lord. In this blind progress he bumped against the nervous legs of "Maria M." She promptly expressed her opinion of the Bickford family and its attaches by rattling the ribs of Hector by a swift poke with her hoof.

The dog barked one astonished yap of indignation and came back with a snap that started the crimson on "Maria's" fetlock. She kicked him between the eyes this time—a blow that floored him. The next instant "Maria M." was away, Todd vainly struggling with the reins and trailing the last of his remarks over his shoulder. The dog was no quitter. He appeared to have the noble blood of which his master had boasted. After a dizzy stagger, he shot away after his assailant—a cloud of dust with a core of dog.

The other drivers, their chins apprehensively over their shoulders, took to the inner oval of the course or to the side lines. Todd, "Maria M.," and Hector were, by general impulse, allowed to become the whole show.

When the mare came under the wire the first time two swipes attempted to stop her by the usual method of suddenly stretching a blanket before her. She spread her legs and squatted. Todd shot forward. The mare had a long, stiff neck. Her driver went astraddle of it and stuck there like a clothes-pin on a line. Hector, in his cloud of dust, dove under the sulky and once more snapped the mare's leg, this time with a vigor that brought a squeal of fright and pain out of her. She went over the blanket and away again. The dog, having received another kick, and evidently realizing that he was still "it" in this grotesque game of tag, kept up the chase.

No one who was at Smyrna fair that day ever remembered just how many times the antagonists circled the track. But when the mare at last began to labor under the weight of her rider, a half-dozen men rushed out and anchored her. The dog growled, dodged the men's kicking feet, and went back under the stand.

"What is this, jedges, a dog-fight or a hoss-trot?" raved Todd, staggering in front of the stand and quivering his thin arms above his head. "Whose is that dog? I've got a right to kill him, and I'm going to. Show yourself over that rail, you old sausage, with a plug hat on it, and tell me what you mean by a send-off like that! What did I tell ye, trustees? It's happened. I'll kill that dog."

"I want you to understand," bellowed the Honorable Bickford, using the megaphone, "you are talking about my dog—a dog that is worth more dollars than that old knock-kneed plug of yours has got hairs in her mane. Put your hand on that dog, and you'll go to State Prison."

"Then I'll bet a thousand dollars to a doughnut ye set that dog on me," howled Marengo. "I heard ye siss him!"

The Honorable J. Percival seemed to be getting more into the spirit of the occasion.

"You're a cross-eyed, wart-nosed liar!" he retorted, with great alacrity.

"I'll stump ye down here," screamed Todd. "I can lick you and your dog, both together."

"If I was in your place," said "Judge" Hiram Look, his interest in horse-trotting paling beside this more familiar phase of sport, "I'd go down and cuff his old chops. You'll have the crowd with you if you do."

But Mr. Bickford, though trembling with rage, could not bring himself to correlate fisticuffs and dignity.

"He is a miserable, cheap horse-jockey, and I shall treat him with the contempt he deserves," he blustered. "If it hadn't been for my dog his old boneyard could never have gone twice around the track, anyway."

The crowds on the grand stand were bellowing: "Trot hosses! Shut up! Trot hosses!"

"Er—what other races have we?" inquired the Honorable J. Percival, as blandly as his violated feelings would allow.

"We haven't had any yet," cried a new voice in the stand—the wrathful voice of Trustee Silas Wallace, of the horse department. After quite a struggle he had managed to tip President Kitchen off the trap-door and had ascended. "We never will have any, either," he shouted, shaking his finger under the president's nose. "What did I tell you would happen? We'll be reported to the National Association."

The crowd across the way roared and barked like beasts of prey, and the insistent and shrill staccato of Marengo Todd sounded over all.

Cap'n Sproul deliberately and with much decision took off his silk hat and held it toward the Honorable Bickford.

"I resign!" he said. "I was shanghaied into this thing against my good judgment, and it's come out just as I expected it would. It ain't no place for me, and I resign!"

"It isn't any place for gentlemen," agreed Mr. Bickford, ignoring the proffered hat. "We seem to be thrown in among some very vulgar people," he went on, his ear out for Marengo's taunts, his eyes boring Trustee Wallace. "It is not at all as I supposed it would be. You cannot expect us to be patrons of the races under these circumstances, Mr. Kitchen. You will please call our barouche. We leave in great displeasure."

"I don't give a red hoorah how you leave, so long as you leave before you've busted up this fair—trot programmy and all," retorted Mr. Wallace, bridling. "I've got three men waitin' ready to come into this stand. They don't wear plug hats, but they know the diff'runce between a dog-fight and a hoss-trot."

"Take this! I don't want it no more," insisted the Cap'n, stung by this repeated reference to plug hats. He poked the head-gear at Mr. Bickford. But that gentleman brushed past him, stumped down the stairs, and strode into the stretch before the stand, loudly calling for the carriage.

Marengo Todd, accepting his sudden and defiant appearance as gage of battle, precipitately withdrew, leaping the fence and disappearing under the grand-stand.

It was five minutes or more ere the barouche appeared, Mr. Parrott requiring to be coaxed by President Kitchen to haul the three disgraced dignitaries away. He seemed to sniff a mob sentiment that might damage his vehicle.

Mr. Bickford's two associates followed him from the stand, the Cap'n abashed and carrying the tall hat behind his back, Hiram Look muttering disgusted profanity under his long mustache.

"I want to say, gentlemen," cried Mr. Bickford, utilizing the interval of waiting to address the throng about him, "that you have no right to blame my dog. He is a valuable animal and a great family pet, and he only did what it is his nature to do."

Marengo Todd was edging back into the crowd, his coat off and something wrapped in the garment.

"Blame no creature for that which it is his nature to do," said Mr. Bickford. "He was attacked first, and he used the weapons nature provided."

"Fam'ly pets, then, has a right to do as it is their nature for to do?" squealed Todd, working nearer.

Mr. Bickford scornfully turned his back on this vulgar railer. The carriage was at hand.

"How about pets known as medder hummin'-birds?" demanded Todd.

The Cap'n was the first in. Hiram came next, kicking out at the amiable Hector, who would have preceded him. When the Honorable J. Percival stepped in, some one slammed the carriage-door so quickly on his heels that his long-tailed coat was caught in the crack.

Todd forced his way close to the carriage as it was about to start. His weak nature was in a state of anger bordering on the maniacal.

"Here's some more family pets for you that ain't any dangerouser than them you're cultivatin'. Take 'em home and study 'em."

He climbed on the wheel and shook out of the folds of his coat a hornets' nest that he had discovered during his temporary exile under the grand-stand. It dropped into Mr. Bickford's lap, and with a swat of his coat Todd crushed it where it lay. It was a coward's revenge, but it was an effective one.

Mr. Bickford leaped, either in pain or in order to pursue the fleeing Marengo, and fell over the side of the carriage. His coat-tail held fast in the door, and suspended him, his toes and fingers just touching the ground. When he jumped he threw the nest as far as he could, and it fell under the horses. Hiram endeavored to open the hack-door as the animals started—but who ever yet opened a hack-door in a hurry?

Cap'n Aaron Sproul's first impulse was the impulse of the sailor who beholds dangerous top-hamper dragging at a craft's side in a squall. He out with his big knife and cut off the Honorable Bickford's coat-tails with one mighty slash, and that gentleman rolled in the dust over the hornets' nest, just outside the wheels, as the carriage roared away down the stretch.

Landlord Parrott was obliged to make one circuit of the track before he could control his steeds, but the triumphal rush down the length of the yelling grand-stand was an ovation that Cap'n Sproul did not relish. He concealed the hateful plug hat between his knees, and scowled straight ahead.

Parrott did not go back after the Honorable Bickford.

The loyal and apologetic Kitchen assisted that gentleman to rise, brushed off his clothes—what were left of them—and carried him to "Bickburn Towers" in his buggy, with Hector wagging sociably in the dust behind.

Mr. Bickford fingered the ragged edge of his severed coat-tails, and kept his thoughts to himself during his ride.

When the old lady Sampson called at the Towers next day with a subscription paper to buy a carpet for the Baptist vestry, James informed her that Mr. Bickford had gone out West to look after his business interests.

When Hiram Look set Cap'n Aaron Sproul down at his door that afternoon he emphasized the embarrassed silence that had continued during the ride by driving away without a word. Equally as saturnine, Cap'n Sproul walked through his dooryard, the battered plug hat in his hand, paying no heed to the somewhat agitated questions of his wife. She watched his march into the corn-field with concern.

She saw him set the hat on the head of a scarecrow whose construction had occupied his spare hours, and in which he felt some little pride. But after surveying the result a moment he seemed to feel that he had insulted a helpless object, for he took the hat off, spat into it, and kicked it into shapeless pulp. Then he came back to the house and grimly asked his wife if she had anything handy to take the poison out of hornet stings.

In Newry, on the glorious Fourth of July, the Proud Bird of Freedom wears a red shirt, a shield hat, and carries a speaking-trumpet clutched under one wing. From the court-house—Newry is the county's shire town—across to the post-office is stretched the well-worn banner:

That banner pitches the key for Independence Day in Newry. The shire patriotically jangles her half-dozen bells in the steeples at daylight in honor of Liberty, and then gives Liberty a stick of candy and a bag of peanuts, and tells her to sit in the shade and keep her eye out sharp for the crowding events of the annual firemen's muster. This may be a cavalier way of treating Liberty, but perhaps Liberty enjoys it better than being kept on her feet all day, listening to speeches and having her ear-drums split by cannon. Who knows? At all events, Newry's programme certainly suits the firemen of the county, from Smyrna in the north to Carthage in the south. And the firemen of the county and their women are the ones who do their shopping in Newry! Liberty was never known to buy as much as a ribbon for her kimono there.

So it's the annual firemen's muster for Newry's Fourth! Red shirts in the forenoon parade, red language at the afternoon tub-trials, red fire in the evening till the last cheer is yawped.

So it was on the day of which this truthful chronicle treats.

Court Street, at ten, ante-meridian, was banked with eager faces. Band music, muffled and mellow, away off somewhere where the parade was forming! Small boys whiling away the tedium of waiting with snap-crackers. Country teams loaded to the edges, and with little Johnny scooched on a cricket in front, hustling down the line of parade to find a nook. Anxious parents scuttling from side to side of the street, dragging red-faced offspring with the same haste and uncertainty hens display to get on the other side of the road—having no especial object in changing, except to change. Chatter of voices, hailings of old friends who signified delighted surprise by profanity and affectionate abuse. Everlasting wailings of penny squawkers!

Behold Newry ready for its annual: "See the Conquering Heroes Come!"

Uncle Brad Trufant stood on the post-office steps, dim and discontented eyes on the vista of Court Street, framed in the drooping elms.

"They don't get the pepper sass into it these days they used to," he said. "These last two years, if it wa'n't for the red shirts and some one forgettin' and cussin' once in a while, you'd think they was classes from a theological seminary marchin' to get their degrees. I can remember when we came down from Vienny twenty years ago with old Niag'ry, and ev'ry man was over six feet tall, and most of 'em had double teeth, upper and lower, all the way 'round. And all wore red shirts. And ev'ry man had one horn, and most of 'em tew. We broke glass when we hollered. We tore up ground when we jumped. We cracked the earth when we lit. Them was real days for firemen!"

"Ain't seen the Smyrna Ancient and Honorable Firemen's Association, Hiram Look foreman, and his new fife-and-drum corps, and the rest of the trimmin's, have you, Uncle Brad?" drawled a man near him. "Well, don't commit yourself too far on old Vienny till the Smyrna part of the parade gets past. I see 'em this mornin' when they unloaded Hecly One and the trimmin's 'foresaid, and I'd advise you to wait a spell before you go to callin' this muster names."

It became apparent a little later that hints of this sort were having their effect on the multitude. Even the head of the great parade, with old John Burt, chief marshal, titupping to the grunt of brass horns, stirred only perfunctory applause. The shouts for Avon's stalwart fifty, with their mascot gander waddling on the right flank, were evidently confined to the Avon excursionists. Starks, Carthage, Salem, Vienna strode past with various evolutions—open order, fours by the right, double-quick, and all the rest, but still the heads turned toward the elm-framed vista of the street. The people were expecting something. It came.

Away down the street there sounded—raggity-tag! raggity-tag!—the tuck of a single drum. Then—pur-r-r-r!

"There's old Smyrna talkin' up!" shrilled a voice in the crowd.

And the jubilant plangor of a fife-and-drum corps burst on the listening ears.

"And there's his pet elephant for a mascot! How's that for Foreman Hiram Look and the Smyrna Ancients and Honer'bles?" squealed the voice once more.

The drum corps came first, twenty strong, snares and basses rattling and booming, the fifers with arms akimbo and cheeks like bladders.

Hiram Look, ex-showman and once proprietor of "Look's Leviathan Circus and Menagerie," came next, lonely in his grandeur. He wore his leather hat, with the huge shield-fin hanging down his back, the word "Foreman" newly lettered on its curved front. He carried two leather buckets on his left arm, and in his right hand flourished his speaking-trumpet. The bed-wrench, chief token of the antiquity of the Ancients, hung from a cord about his neck, and the huge bag, with a puckering-string run about its mouth, dangled from his waist.

At his heels shambled the elephant, companion of his circus wanderings, and whose old age he had sworn to protect and make peaceful. A banner was hung from each ear, and she slouched along at a brisk pace, in order to keep the person of her lord and master within reach of her moist and wistful trunk. She wore a blanket on which was printed: "Imogene, Mascot of the Smyrna Ancients." Imogene was making herself useful as well as ornamental, for she was harnessed to the pole of "Hecla Number One," and the old tub "ruckle-chuckled" along at her heels on its little red trucks. From its brake-bars hung the banners won in the past-and-gone victories of twenty years of musters. Among these was one inscribed "Champions."

And behind Hecla marched, seventy-five strong, the Ancients of Smyrna, augmented, by Hiram Look's enterprise, until they comprised nearly every able-bodied man in the old town.

To beat and pulse of riotous drums and shrilling fifes they were roaring choruses. It was the old war song of the organization, product of a quarter-century of rip-roaring defiance, crystallized from the lyrics of the hard-fisted.

They let the bass drums accent for them.

      "Here wec-come from old Sy-myrná
            Here wec-come with Hecly One;
        She's the prunes for a squirt, gol durn her—
            We've come down for fight or fun.
        Shang, de-rango! We're the bo-kay,
        Don't giveadam for no one no way.

      "Here wec-come—sing old A'nt Rhody!
            See old Hecly paw up dirt.
        Stuff her pod with rocks and sody,
            Jee-ro C'ris'mus, how she'll squirt!
        Rip-te-hoo! And a hip, hip, holler,
        We'll lick hell for a half a dollar!"

The post-office windows rattled and shivered in the sunshine. Horses along the line of march crouched, ducked sideways, and snorted in panic. Women put their fingers in their ears as the drums passed. And when at the end of each verse the Ancients swelled their red-shirted bosoms and screamed, Uncle Trufant hissed in the ear of his nearest neighbor on the post-office steps: "The only thing we need is the old Vienny company here to give 'em the stump! Old Vienny, as it used to be, could lick 'em, el'funt and all."

The Smyrna Ancients were file-closers of the parade; Hiram Look had chosen his position with an eye to effect that made all the other companies seem to do mere escort duty. The orderly lines of spectators poured together into the street behind, and went elbowing in noisy rout to the village square, the grand rallying-point and arena of the day's contests. There, taking their warriors' ease before the battle, the Ancients, as disposed by their assiduous foreman, continued the centre of observation.

Uncle Brad Trufant, nursing ancient memories of the prowess of Niagara and the Viennese, voiced some of the sentiment of the envious when he muttered: "Eatin', allus eatin'! The only fire they can handle is a fire in a cook-stove."

On this occasion Foreman Look had responded nobly to the well-known gastronomic call of his Ancients. No one understood better than he the importance of the commissary in a campaign. The dinner he had given the Ancients to celebrate his election as foreman had shown him the way to their hearts.

Bringing up the rear had rumbled one of his circus-vans. Now, with the eyes of the hungry multitude on him, he unlocked the doors and disclosed an interior packed full of individual lunch-baskets. His men cheered lustily and formed in line.

Foreman Look gazed on his cohorts with pride and fondness.

"Gents," he said, in a clarion voice that took all the bystanders into his confidence, "you're never goin' to make any mistake in followin' me. Follow me when duty calls—follow me when pleasure speaks, and you'll always find me with the goods."

He waved his hand at the open door of the van.

Two ladies had been awaiting the arrival of the Ancients in the square, squired by a stout man in blue, who scruffed his fingers through his stubbly gray beard from time to time with no great ease of manner. Most of the spectators knew him. He was the first selectman of Smyrna, Cap'n Aaron Sproul. And when the ladies, at a signal from Foreman Look, took stations at the van door and began to distribute the baskets, whisperings announced that they were respectively the wives of Cap'n Sproul and the foreman of Hecla One. The ladies wore red, white, and blue aprons, and rosettes of patriotic hues, and their smiling faces indicated their zest in their duties.

Uncle Trufant, as a hound scents game, sniffed Cap'n Sproul's uneasy rebelliousness, and seemed to know with a sixth sense that only Hiram's most insistent appeals to his friendship, coupled with the coaxings of the women-folk, had dragged him down from Smyrna. Uncle Trufant edged up to him and pointed wavering cane at the festive scene of distribution.

"Seems to be spendin' his money on 'em, all free and easy, Cap'n."

The Cap'n scowled and grunted.

"It's good to have a lot of money like he's got. That's the kind of a foreman them caterpillars is lookin' for. But if greenbacks growed all over him, like leaves on a tree, they'd keep at him till they'd gnawed 'em all off."

He glowered at the briskly wagging jaws and stuffed cheeks of the feeding protégés of Foreman Look.

"I reckon he'll wake up some day, same's you did, and reelize what they're tryin' to do to him. What you ought to done was settle in Vienny. We've heard out our way how them Smyrna bloodsuckers have—"

Cap'n Sproul whirled on the ancient detractor, whiskers bristling angrily. He had never been backward in pointing out Smyrna's faults. But to have an outsider do it in the open forum of a firemen's muster was a different matter.

"Before I started in to criticise other towns or brag about my own, Trufant," he snorted, "I'd move over into some place where citizens like you, that's been dead ten years and ought to be buried, ain't walkin' round because there ain't soil enough left in town to bury 'em in." This was biting reference to Vienna's ledgy surface.

"I'd ruther walk on granite than have web feet and paddle in muck," retorted Uncle Trufant, ready with the ancient taunt as to the big bog that occupied Smyrna's interior.

"Ducks are good property," rejoined the Cap'n, serenely, "but I never heard of any one keepin' crows for pets nor raisin' 'em for market. There ain't anything but a crow will light on your town, and they only do it because the sight of it makes 'em faint."

Stimulated because bystanders were listening to the colloquy, Uncle Trufant shook his cane under Cap'n Sproul's nose.

"That's what ye be in Smyrna—ducks!" he squealed. "You yourself come to your own when ye waddled off'm the deck of a ship and settled there. Down here to-day with an el'funt and what's left of a busted circus, and singin' brag songs, when there ain't a man in this county but what knows Smyrna never had the gristle to put up a fight man-fashion at a firemen's muster. Vienny can shake one fist at ye and run ye up a tree. Vienny has allus done it. Vienny allus will do it. Ye can't fight!"

Hiram had cocked his ear at sound of Uncle Trufant's petulant squeal. He thrust close to them, elbowing the crowd.

"Fight! Why, you old black and tan, what has fightin' got to do with the makin' of a fire department? There's been too much fightin' in years past. It's a lot of old terriers like you that had made firemen looked down on. Your idee of fire equipment was a kag of new rum and plenty of brass knuckles. I can show ye that times has changed! Look at that picture there!" He waved his hairy hand at the ladies who were distributing the last of the lunch-baskets. "That's the way to come to muster—come like gents, act like gents, eat like gents, and when it's all over march with your lady on your arm."

"Three cheers for the ladies!" yelled an enthusiastic member of the Smyrna company. The cheers coming up had to crowd past food going down, but the effect was good, nevertheless.

"That's the idea!" shouted Hiram. "Peace and politeness, and everybody happy. If that kind of a firemen's muster don't suit Vienny, then her company better take the next train back home and put in the rest of the day firin' rocks at each other. If Vienny stays here she's got to be genteel, like the rest of us—and the Smyrna Ancients will set the pace. Ain't that so, boys?"

His men yelled jubilant assent.

Uncle Trufant's little eyes shuttled balefully.

"Oh, that's it, is it?" he jeered. "I didn't know I'd got into the ladies' sewin'-circle. But if you've got fancy-work in them shoppin'-bags of your'n, and propose to set under the trees this afternoon and do tattin', I wouldn't advise ye to keep singin' that song you marched in here with. It ain't ladylike. Better sing, 'Oh, how we love our teacher dear!'"

"Don't you fuss your mind about us in any way, shape, or manner," retorted the foreman. "When we march we march, when we eat we eat, when we sing we sing, when we squirt"—he raised his voice and glared at the crowd surrounding—"we'll give ye a stream that the whole Vienny fire company can straddle and ride home on like it was a hobby-horse." And, concluding thus, he fondled his long mustaches away from his mouth and gazed on the populace with calm pride. Cæsar on the plains of Pharsalia, Pompey triumphant on the shores of Africa, Alexander at the head of his conquering Macedonians had not more serenity of countenance to display to the multitude.

Up came trotting a brisk little man with a notebook in one hand, a stubby lead-pencil in the other, a look of importance spread over his flushed features, and on his breast a broad, blue ribbon, inscribed: "Chief Marshal."

"Smyrna has drawed number five for the squirt," he announced, "fallerin' Vienny. Committee on tub contests has selected Colonel Gideon Ward as referee."

Hiram's eyes began to blaze, and Cap'n Sproul growled oaths under his breath. During the weeks of their growing intimacy the Cap'n had detailed to his friend the various phases of Colonel Gideon's iniquity as displayed toward him. Though the affairs of Hiram Look had not yet brought him into conflict with the ancient tyrant of Smyrna, Hiram had warmly espoused the cause and the grudge of the Cap'n.

"I'll bet a thousand dollars against a jelly-fish's hind leg that he begged the job so as to do you," whispered Sproul. "I ain't been a brother-in-law of his goin' on two years not to know his shenanigan. It's a plot."

"Who picked out that old cross between a split-saw and a bull-thistle to umpire this muster?" shouted the foreman of the Ancients, to the amazement of the brisk little man.

"Why, he's the leadin' man in this section, and a Smyrna man at that," explained the marshal. "I don't see how your company has got any kick comin'. He's one of your own townsmen."

"And that's why we know him better than you do," protested Hiram, taking further cue from the glowering gaze of Cap'n Sproul. "You put him out there with the tape, and you'll see—"

"'Peace and politeness, and everybody happy,'" quoted Uncle Trufant, maliciously. The serenity had departed from Foreman Look's face.

"You don't pretend to tell me, do ye, that the Smyrna Ancients are afraid to have one of their own citizens as a referee?" demanded the brisk little man suspiciously. "If that's so, then there must be something decayed about your organization."

"I don't think they're down here to squirt accordin' to the rules made and pervided," went on the ancient Vienna satirist. "They've brought Bostin bags and a couple of wimmen, and are goin' to have a quiltin'-bee. P'raps they think that Kunnel Gid Ward don't know a fish-bone stitch from an over-and-over. P'raps they think Kunnel Ward ain't ladylike enough for 'em."

Not only had the serenity departed from the face of Foreman Look, the furious anger of his notoriously short temper had taken its place.

"By the jumped-up jedux," he shouted, "you pass me any more of that talk, you old hook-nosed cockatoo, and I'll slap your chops!"

The unterrified veteran of the Viennese brandished his cane to embrace the throng of his red-shirted townsmen, who had been crowding close to hear. At last his flint had struck the spark that flashed with something of the good old times about it.

"And what do you suppose the town of Vienny would be doin' whilst you was insultin' the man who was the chief of old Niag'ry Company for twenty years?" he screamed.

"There's one elephant that I know about that would be an orphin in about fifteen seconds," growled one of the loyal members of the Vienna company, the lust of old days of rivalry beginning to stir in his blood.

"Would, hey?" shouted an Ancient, with the alacrity of one who has old-time grudges still unsettled. He put a sandwich back into his basket untasted, an ominous sign of how belligerency was overcoming appetite. "Well, make b'lieve I'm the front door of the orphin asylum, and come up and rap on me!"

With a promptitude that was absolutely terrifying the two lines of red shirts began to draw together, voices growling bodingly, fists clinching, eyes narrowing with the reviving hatred of old contests. The triumphal entry of the Smyrna Ancients, their display of prosperity, their monopoly of the plaudits and attention of the throngs, the assumption of superior caste and manners, had stirred resentment under every red shirt in the parade. But Vienna, hereditary foe, seemed to be the one tacitly selected for the brunt of the conflict.

"Hiram!" pleaded his wife, running to him and patting his convulsed features with trembling fingers. "You said this was all goin' to be genteel. You said you were goin' to show 'em how good manners and politeness ought to run a firemen's muster. You said you were!"

By as mighty an effort of self-control as he ever exercised in his life, Hiram managed to gulp back the sulphurous vilification he had ready at his tongue's end, and paused a moment.

"That's right! I did say it!" he bellowed, his eyes sweeping the crowd over his wife's shoulder. "And I mean it. It sha'n't be said that the Smyrna Ancients were anything but gents. Let them that think a bunged eye and a bloody nose is the right kind of badges to wear away from a firemen's muster keep right on in their hellish career. As for us"—he tucked his wife's arm under his own—"we remember there's ladies present."

"Includin' the elephant," suggested the irrepressible Uncle Trufant, indicating with his cane Imogene "weaving" amiably in the sunshine.

Cap'n Sproul crowded close and growled into the ear of the venerable mischief-maker: "I don't know who set you on to thorn this crowd of men into a fight, and I don't care. But there ain't goin' to be no trouble here, and, if you keep on tryin' to make it, I'll give you one figger of the Portygee fandle-dingo."

"What's that?" inquired Uncle Trufant, with interest.

"An almighty good lickin'," quoth the peacemaker. "I ain't a member of a fire company, and I ain't under no word of honor not to fight."

The two men snapped their angry eyes at each other, and Uncle Trufant turned away, intimidated for the moment. He confessed to himself that he didn't exactly understand how far a seafaring man could be trifled with.

Vienna gazed truculently on Smyrna for a time, but Smyrna, obeying their foreman's adjurations, mellowed into amiable grins and went on with their lunches.

"Where's that Spitz poodle with the blue ribbon?" inquired the Cap'n of Hiram, having reference to the brisk little man and his side whiskers. "It don't appear to me that you pounded it into his head solid enough about our not standin' for Gid Ward."

In the stress of other difficulties Hiram had forgotten the dispute that started the quarrel.

"Don't let's have any more argument, Hiram," pleaded his wife.

"She's right, Cap'n," said the foreman. "Standin' up for your rights is good and proper business, but it's a darn slippery place we're tryin' to stand on. Let the old pirate referee. We can outsquirt 'em. He won't dast to cheat us. I'm goin' to appoint you to represent Smyrna up there at the head of the stream. Keep your eye out for a square deal."

"I don't know a thing about squirtin', and I won't get mixed in," protested the Cap'n. But the members of the Smyrna company crowded around him with appeals.

"There's only this to know," urged Hiram. "The judges lay down sheets of brown paper and measure to the farthest drop. All you've got to do is keep your eye out and see that we get our rights. You'll only be actin' as a citizen of our town—and as first selectman you can insist on our rights. And you can do it in a gentlemanly way, accordin' to the programme we've mapped out. Peace and politeness—that's the motto for Smyrna."

And in the end Cap'n Sproul allowed himself to be persuaded.

But it was scarcely persuasion that did it.

It was this plaintive remark of the foreman: "Are you goin' to stand by and see Gideon Ward do us, and then give you the laugh?"

Therefore the Cap'n buttoned his blue coat tightly and trudged up to where the committee was busy with the sheets of brown paper, weighting them with stones so that the July breeze could not flutter them away.

Starks, Carthage, and Salem made but passable showing. They seemed to feel that the crowd took but little interest in them. The listless applause that had greeted them in the parade showed that.

Then, with a howl, half-sullen, half-ferocious, Vienna trundled old Niagara to the reservoir, stuck her intake pipe deep in the water, and manned her brake-beams. To the surprise of the onlookers her regular foreman took his station with the rest of the crew. Uncle Brad Trufant, foreman emeritus, took command. He climbed slowly upon her tank, braced himself against the bell-hanger, and shook his cane in the air.

"Look at me!" he yelled, his voice cracking into a squall. "Look at me and remember them that's dead and gone, your fathers and your grands'rs, whose old fists used to grip them bars right where you've got your hands. Think of 'em, and then set your teeth and yank the 'tarnal daylights out of her. Are ye goin' to let me stand here—me that has seen your grands'rs pump—and have it said that old Niag'ry was licked by a passul of knittin'-work old-maids, led by an elephant and a peep-show man? Be ye goin' to let 'em outsquirt ye? Why, the wimmen-folks of Vienny will put p'isen in your biscuits if you go home beat by anything that Smyrna can turn out. Git a-holt them bars! Clench your chaws! Now, damye, ye toggle-j'inted, dough-fingered, wall-eyed sons of sea-cooks, give her tar—give—her—tar!"

It was the old-fashioned style of exordium by an old-fashioned foreman, who believed that the best results could be obtained by the most scurrilous abuse of his men—and the immediate efforts of Vienna seemed to endorse his opinion.

With the foreman marking time with "Hoomp!—hoomp!" they began to surge at the bars, arms interlaced, hands, brown and gristly, covering the leather from end to end. The long, snaking hose filled and plumped out with snappings.

Uncle Trufant flung his hat afar, doubled forward, and with white hair bristling on his head began to curse horribly. Occasionally he rapped at a laggard with his cane. Then, like an insane orchestra-leader, he sliced the air about his head and launched fresh volleys of picturesque profanity.

Old Niagara rocked and danced. The four hosemen staggered as the stream ripped from the nozzle, crackling like pistol discharges. There was no question as to Uncle Trufant's ability to get the most out of the ancient pride of Vienna. He knew Niagara's resources.

"Ease her!" he screamed, after the first dizzy staccato of the beams. "Ease her! Steady! Get your motion! Up—down! Up—down! Get your motion! Take holt of her! Lift her! Now—now—now! For the last ounce of wickin' that's in ye! Give her—hell!"

It was the crucial effort. Men flung themselves at the beams. Legs flapped like garments on a clothes-line in a crazy gale. And when Uncle Trufant clashed the bell they staggered away, one by one, and fell upon the grass of the square.

"A hundred and seventeen feet, eight inches and one-half!" came the yell down the line, and at the word Vienna rose on her elbows and bawled hoarse cheers.

The cheer was echoed tumultuously, for every man in the crowd of spectators knew that this was full twenty feet better than the record score of all musters—made by Smyrna two years before, with wind and all conditions favoring.

"That's what old times and old-fashioned cussin' can do for ye," declared Uncle Trufant.

A man—a short, squat man in a blue coat—came pelting down the street from the direction of the judges. It was Cap'n Aaron Sproul. People got out of his way when they got a glimpse of the fury on his face. He tore into the press of Smyrna fire-fighters, who were massed about Hecla, their faces downcast at announcement of this astonishing squirt.

"A hunderd and seventeen northin'! A hunderd and seventeen northin'!" Cap'n Sproul gasped over and over. "I knowed he was in to do us! I see him do it! It wa'n't no hunderd and seventeen! It's a fraud!"

"You're a liar!" cried Uncle Trufant, promptly. But the Cap'n refused to be diverted into argument.

"I went up there to watch Gid Ward, and I watched him," he informed the Ancients. "The rest of 'em was watchin' the squirt, but I was watchin' that land-pirut. I see him spit on that paper twenty feet further'n the furthest drop of water, and then he measured from that spit. That's the kind of a man that's refereein' this thing. He's here to do us! He's paying off his old town-meetin' grudge!"

"Oh, I can't think that of my brother!" cried the Cap'n's wife.

"Remember, Hiram, that you've agreed—" began the cautious spouse of the foreman, noting with alarm the rigid lines beginning to crease her husband's face.

"There ain't no mistake about his measurin' to that spit?" demanded Hiram of the Cap'n, in the level tones of one already convinced but willing to give the accused one a last chance.

"He done it—I swear he done it."

"I'd thought," pursued the foreman of the Ancients, "that a firemen's muster could be made genteel, and would make a pleasant little trip for the ladies. I was mistaken." At the look in his eyes his wife began eager appeal, but he simply picked her up and placed her in the van from which the lunch-baskets had been taken. "There's Mis' Look," he said to the Cap'n. "She'll be glad to have the company of Mis' Sproul."

Without a word the Cap'n picked up Louada Murilla and placed her beside the half-fainting Mrs. Look. Hiram closed the doors of the van.

"Drive out about two miles," he ordered the man on the box, "and then let the ladies git out and pick bokays and enjoy nature for the rest of the afternoon. It's—it's—apt to be kind of stuffy here in the village."

And the van rumbled away down the street toward the vista framed in the drooping elms.

"Now, gents," said Hiram to his men, "if this is a spittin'-at-a-crack contest instead of a tub-squirt, I reckon we'd better go to headquarters and find out about it."

But at Smyrna's announced determination to raid the referee, Vienna massed itself in the way. It began to look like the good old times, and the spectators started a hasty rush to withdraw from the scene.

But Vienna was too openly eager for pitched battle.

To stop then and give them what they had been soliciting all day seemed too much like gracious accommodation in the view of Foreman Look. His business just at that moment was with Colonel Gideon Ward, and he promptly thought of a way to get to him.

At a signal the intelligent Imogene hooped her trunk about him and hoisted him to her neck. Then she started up the street, brandishing the trunk before her like a policeman's billy and "roomping" in hoarse warning to those who encumbered her path.

A charge led by an elephant was not in the martial calculations of the Viennese. They broke and fled incontinently.

Perhaps Colonel Gideon Ward would have fled also, but the crowd that had gathered to watch the results of the hose-play was banked closely in the street.

"Make way!" bellowed Foreman Look. "There's only one man I want, and I'm goin' to have him. Keep out of my road and you won't get hurt. Now, Colonel Gideon Ward," he shouted, from his grotesque mount, as that gentleman, held at bay partly by his pride and partly by the populace, came face to face with him, "I've been in the circus business long enough to know a fake when I see one. You've been caught at it. Own up!"

The Colonel snorted indignantly and scornfully.

"You don't own up, then?" queried Hiram.

"I'll give you five minutes to stop circusin' and get your tub astraddle that reservoir," snapped the referee.

"It occurs to me," went on Hiram, "that you can spit farther if you're up a tree. We want you to do your best when you spit for us."

Colonel Ward blinked without appearing to understand.

But the foreman of the Smyrna Ancients immediately made it evident that he had evolved a peculiar method of dealing with the case in hand. He drove Imogene straight at the goggling referee.

"Up that tree!" roared Hiram. "She'll kill you if you don't."

Indeed, the elephant was brandishing her trunk in a ferocious manner. A ladder was leaning against a near-by elm, and Colonel Ward, almost under the trudging feet of the huge beast, tossed dignity to the winds. He ran up the ladder, and Imogene, responding to a cuff on her head, promptly dragged it away from the tree.

"Only three minutes left to get Hecla into position," Hiram shouted. "Referee says so. Lively with her!"

Around and around in a circle he kept Imogene shambling, driving the crowd back from the tree. The unhappy Colonel was marooned there in solitary state.

At first the Vienna company showed a hesitating inclination to interfere with the placing of Hecla, suspecting something untoward in the astonishing elevation of the referee. But even Uncle Trufant was slow to assume the responsibility of interfering with a company's right of contest.

The Ancients located their engine, coupled the hose, and ran it out with alacrity.

"Colonel Ward," shouted Hiram, "you've tried to do it, but you can't. If it's got to be dog eat dog, and no gents need apply at a firemen's muster, then here's where we have our part of the lunch. Did you measure in twenty extry feet up to your spit mark? Speak up! A quick answer turneth away the hose!"

By this time the crew was gently working the brakes of old Hecla. The hose quivered, and the four men at the nozzle felt it twitching as the water pressed at the closed valve. They were grinning, for now they realized the nature of their foreman's mode of persuasion.

Vienna realized it, too, for with a howl of protest her men came swarming into the square.

"Souse the hide off'm the red-bellied sons of Gehenna!" Hiram yelled, and the hosemen, obedient to the word, swept the hissing stream on the enemy.

Men who will face bullets will run from hornets.

Men who will charge cannon can be routed by water.

The men at the brakes of old Hecla pumped till the tub jigged on her trucks like a fantastic dancer. To right, to left, in whooshing circles, or dwelling for an instant on some particularly obstreperous Vienna man, the great stream played. Some were knocked flat, some fell and were rolled bodily out of the square by the stream, others ran wildly with their arms over their heads. The air was full of leather hats, spinning as the water struck them. Every now and then the hosemen elevated the nozzle and gave Colonel Gideon Ward his share. A half-dozen times he nearly fell off his perch and flapped out like a rag on a bush.

"It certainly ain't no place for ladies!" communed Hiram with himself, gazing abroad from his elevated position on Imogene's neck. "I thought it was once, but it ain't."

"Colonel Gideon Ward," he shouted to the limp and dripping figure in the tree, "do you own up?"

The Colonel withdrew one arm to shake his fist at the speaker, and narrowly saved himself by instantly clutching again, for the crackling stream tore at him viciously.

"We'll drownd ye where ye hang," roared the foreman of the Ancients, "before we'll let you or any other pirate rinky-dink us out of what belongs to us."

Like some Hindu magician transplanted to Yankeedom he bestrode the neck of his elephant, and with his hand summoned the waving stream to do his will. Now he directed its spitting force on the infuriated Colonel; now he put to flight some Vienna man who plucked up a little fleeting courage.

And at last Colonel Ward knuckled. There was nothing else to do.

"I made a mistake," he said, in a moment of respite from the stream.

"You spit on the paper and measured in twenty extry feet jest as Cap'n Aaron Sproul said you did," insisted Hiram. "Say that, and say it loud, or we'll give old Hecly the wickin' and blow you out of that tree."

And after ineffectual oaths the Colonel said it—said it twice, and the second time much the louder.

"Then," bellowed the triumphant Hiram, "the record of old Hecly Number One still stands, and the championship banner travels back to Smyrna with us to-night, jest as it travelled down this mornin'."

"Hain't you goin' to squirt?" asked some one posted safely behind a distant tree.

"If you'd been payin' 'tention as you ought to be you'd have jest seen us squirtin'," replied the foreman of the Ancients with quiet satire. "And when we squirt, we squirt to win."

Cap'n Aaron Sproul turned away from a rapt and lengthy survey of Colonel Ward in the tree.

"Did you ever ride on an elephant, Cap'n Sproul?" inquired Hiram.

"Never tried it," said the seaman.

"Well, I want you to come up here with me. Imogene will h'ist you. I was thinkin', as it's gettin' rather dull here in the village just now"—Hiram yawned obtrusively—"we'd go out and join the ladies. I reckon the company'd like to go along and set on the grass, and pee-ruse nature for a little while, and eat up what's left in them lunch-baskets."

Ten minutes later the Smyrna Ancients and Honorables took their departure down the street bordered by the elms. Hiram Look and Cap'n Aaron Sproul swayed comfortably on Imogene's broad back. The fife-and-drum corps followed, and behind marched the champions, dragging Hecla Number One on its ruckling trucks.

Then, with the bass drums punctuating and accenting, they sang:

      "Rip-te-hoo! And a hip, hip, holler!
        We'll lick hell for a half a dollar!"

And it wasn't till then that some bystander tore his attention away long enough to stick a ladder up the elm-tree and let Colonel Gideon Ward scrape his way despondently down.

Probably Constable Zeburee Nute could not have picked out a moment more inauspicious for tackling First Selectman Aaron Sproul on business not immediately connected with the matter then in hand.

First Selectman Sproul was standing beside a granite post, pounding his fist on it with little regard to barked knuckles and uttering some perfectly awful profanity.

A man stood on the other side of the post, swearing with just as much gusto; the burden of his remarks being that he wasn't afraid of any by-joosly old split codfish that ever came ashore—insulting reference to Cap'n Sproul's seafaring life.

Behind Cap'n Sproul were men with pickaxes, shovels, and hoes—listening.

Behind the decrier of mariners were men with other shovels, hoes, and pickaxes—listening.

The granite post marked the town line between Smyrna and Vienna.

The post was four miles or so from Smyrna village, and Constable Nute had driven out to interview the first selectman, bringing as a passenger a slim, pale young man, who was smoking cigarettes, one after the other.

They arrived right at the climax of trouble that had been brooding sullenly for a week. In annual town-meeting Smyrna and Vienna had voted to change over the inter-urban highway so that it would skirt Rattledown Hill instead of climbing straight over it, as the fathers had laid it out in the old days for the sake of directness; forgetting that a pail bail upright is just as long as a pail bail lying horizontal.

First Selectman Sproul had ordered his men to take a certain direction with the new road in order to avoid some obstructions that would entail extra expense on the town of Smyrna.

Selectman Trufant, of Vienna, was equally as solicitous about saving expense on behalf of his own town, and refused to swing his road to meet Smyrna's highway. Result: the two pieces of highway came to the town line and there stopped doggedly. There were at least a dozen rods between the two ends. To judge from the language that the two town officers were now exchanging across the granite post, it seemed likely that the roads would stay separated.

"Our s'leckman can outtalk him three to one," confided one of the Smyrna supporters to Constable Nute. "I never heard deep-water cussin' before, with all the trimmin's. Old Trufant ain't got northin' but side-hill conversation, and I reckon he's about run down."

Constable Nute should have awaited more fitting opportunity, but Constable Nute was a rather direct and one-ideaed person. As manager of the town hall he had business to transact with the first selectman, and he proceeded to transact it.

"Mister S'leckman," he shouted, "I want to introduce you to Perfessor—Perfessor—I ain't got your name yit so I can speak it," he said, turning to his passenger.

"Professor Derolli," prompted the passenger, flicking his cigarette ash.

Cap'n Sproul merely shot one red glance over his shoulder, and then proceeded with his arraignment of Vienna in general—mentally, morally, socially, politically, and commercially.

"The perfessor," bawled Constable Nute, unable to get his team very near the selectman on account of the upheaved condition of the road, "has jest arranged with me to hire the town hall for a week, and he wants to arrange with the selectmen to borrow the use of the graveyard for a day or so."

The constable's vociferousness put the Cap'n out of voice, and he whirled to find that his auditors had lost all interest in the road dispute, and naturally, too.

"To borrow the use of the graveyard, said privilege bein' throwed in, considerin' that he hires the town hall for a week," repeated the constable.

Cap'n Sproul hated cigarettes; and he hated slim, pale young men who dressed foppishly, classing all such under the general term "dude." The combination of the two, attending the interruption of his absorbing business of the moment, put a wire edge on his temper.

"Graveyard! Yes!" he roared. "I'll appoint his funeral for two o'clock this afternoon, and I'll guarantee to have the corpse ready."

"In transactin' business it ain't no time for jokin'," protested the direct Mr. Nute.

"There's no joke to it," returned the Cap'n, viciously, seizing a pickaxe.

"It ain't much of a way for a first selectman of a town to act in public," persisted Constable Nute, "when town business is put before him."

That remark and a supercilious glance from the professor through his cigarette smoke brought the Cap'n on the trot to the side of the wagon.

"I'm 'tendin' to town business—don't you forget that! And I'm 'tendin' to it so close that I ain't got time to waste on any cheap peep-show critters. Don't want 'em in town. Clear out!"

"I'll make you sorry for insulting a gentleman," the professor threatened.

"Clear out!" insisted the Cap'n. "You ain't got any right drivin' onto this road. It ain't been opened to travel—"

"And it looks as though it never would be," remarked Constable Nute, sarcastically; but, daunted by the glare in the Cap'n's eyes, he began to turn his horse. "I want you to understand, S'leckman Sproul, that there are two other s'leckmen in this town, and you can't run everything, even if you've started in to do it."

It was pointed reference to the differences that existed in the board of selectmen, on account of Cap'n Sproul's determination to command.

Two very indignant men rode away, leaving a perfectly furious one standing in the road shaking his fists after them. And he was the more angry because he felt that he had been hastier with the constable than even his overwrought state of mind warranted. Then, as he reflected on the graveyard matter, his curiosity began to get the better of his wrath, and to the surprise of his Vienna antagonist he abandoned the field without another word and started for Smyrna village with his men and dump-carts.

But dump-carts move slowly, and when the Cap'n arrived at the town house Constable Zeburee Nute was nailing up a hand-bill that announced that Professor Derolli, the celebrated hypnotist, would occupy the town hall for a week, and that he would perform the remarkable feat of burying a subject in the local graveyard for forty-eight hours, and that he would "raise this subject from the dead," alive and well. The ink was just dry on a permit to use the graveyard, signed by Selectmen Batson Reeves and Philias Blodgett. The grim experiment was to wind up the professor's engagement. In the mean time he was to give a nightly entertainment at the hall, consisting of hypnotism and psychic readings, the latter by "that astounding occult seer and prophetess, Madame Dawn."

Cap'n Sproul went home growling strong language, but confessing to himself that he was a little ashamed to enter into any further contest with the cigarette-smoking showman and the two men who were the Cap'n's hated associates on the board of selectmen.

That evening neighbor Hiram Look called with Mrs. Look on their way to the village to attend the show, but Cap'n Sproul doggedly resisted their appeals that he take his wife and go along, too. He opposed no objection, however, when Louada Murilla decided that she would accept neighbor Look's offer of escort.

But when she came back and looked at him, and sighed, and sighed, and looked at him till bedtime, shaking her head sadly when he demanded the reason for her pensiveness, he wished he had made her stay at home. He decided that Zeburee Nute had probably been busy with his tongue as to that boyish display of temper on the Rattledown Hill road.

Hiram Look came over early the next morning and found the Cap'n thinning beets in his garden. The expression on the visitor's face did not harmonize with the brightness of the sunshine.

"I don't blame you for not goin'," he growled. "But if you had an idea of what they was goin' to do to get even, I should 'a' most thought you'd 'a' tipped me off. It would have been the part of a friend, anyway."

The Cap'n blinked up at him in mute query.

"It ain't ever safe to sass people that's got the ear of the public, like reporters and show people," proceeded Hiram, rebukingly. "I've been in the show business, and I know. They can do you, and do you plenty, and you don't stand the show of an isuckle in a hot spider."

"What are ye tryin' to get through you, anyway?" demanded the first selectman.

"Hain't your wife said northin' about it?"

"She's set and looked at me like I was a cake that she'd forgot in the oven," confided the Cap'n, sullenly; "but that's all I know about it."

"Well, that's about what I've had to stand in my fam'ly, too. I tell ye, ye hadn't ought to have sassed that mesmerist feller. Oh, I heard all about it," he cried, flapping hand of protest as the Cap'n tried to speak. "I don't know why you done it. What I say is, you ought to have consulted me. I know show people better'n you do. Then you ain't heard northin' of what she said?"

"If you've got anything to tell me, why in the name of the three-toed Cicero don't you tell it?" blurted the Cap'n, indignantly.

He got up and brushed the dirt off his knees. "If there's anything that stirs my temper, it's this mumble-grumble, whiffle-and-hint business. Out and open, that's my style." He was reflecting testily on the peculiar reticence of his wife.

"I agree with you," replied Hiram, calmly. But his mind was on another phase of the question. "If she had been out and open it wouldn't have been so bad. It's this hintin' that does the most mischief. Give folks a hint, and a nasty imagination will do the rest. That's the way she's workin' it."

"She? Who?"

"Your mesmerist fellow's runnin' mate—that woman that calls herself Madame Dawn, and reads the past and tells the future."

"There ain't nobody can do no such thing," snapped Cap'n Sproul. "They're both frauds, and I didn't want 'em in town, and I was right about it."

"Bein' as how I was in the show business thirty years, you needn't feel called on to post me on fakes," said Hiram, tartly. "But the bigger the fake is the better it catches the crowd. If she'd simply been an old scandal-monger at a quiltin'-bee and started a story about us, we could run down the story and run old scandal-grabber up a tree. But when a woman goes into a trance and a sperit comes teeterin' out from the dark behind the stage and drops a white robe over her, and she begins to occult, or whatever they call it, and speaks of them in high places, and them with fat moneybags, and that ain't been long in our midst, and has come from no one jest knows where, and that she sees black shadders followin' 'em, along with wimmen weepin' and wringin' of their hands—well, when a woman sets on the town-hall stage and goes on in that strain for a half-hour, it ain't the kind of a show that I want to be at—not with my wife and yourn on the same settee with me."

He scowled on the Cap'n's increasing perturbation.

"A man is a darned fool to fight a polecat, Cap'n Sproul, and you ought to have known better than to let drive at him as you did."

"She didn't call names, did she?" asked the Cap'n.

"Call names! Of course she didn't call names. Didn't have to. There's the difference between scandal and occultin'. We can't get no bind on her for what she said. Now here are you and me, back here to settle down after roamin' the wide world over; jest got our feet placed, as you might say, and new married to good wimmen—and because we're a little forehanded and independent, and seem to be enjoyin' life, every one is all ready to believe the worst about us on general principles. Mossbacks are always ready to believe that a man that's travelled any has been raising seventeen kinds of tophet all his life. All she had to do was go into a trance, talk a little Injun, and then hint enough to set their imaginations to workin' about us. Up to now, judgin' by the way she's been lookin' at me, my wife believes I've got seven wives strewed around the country somewhere, either alive or buried in cellars. As to your wife, you bein' a seafarin' character, she's prob'ly got it figgered that a round-up of your fam'ly circle, admittin' all that's got a claim on you, would range all the way from a Hindu to a Hottentot, and would look like a congress of nations. In about two days more—imagination still workin', and a few old she devils in this place startin' stories to help it along—our wives will be hoppin' up every ten minutes to look down the road and see if any of the victims have hove in sight. And what can we do?"

Hiram lunged a vigorous kick straight before him.

"Find me that hole I just made in the air and I'll tell you, Cap'n," he added, with bitter irony.

"It's—it's worse than what I figgered on," remarked the Cap'n, despondently, after a thoughtful pause. "If a woman like Louada Murilla will let herself get fooled and stirred up in that kind of a way by a fly-by-night critter, there ain't much hope of the rest of the neighborhood."

"It's a kind of lyin' that there ain't no fightin'," Hiram asserted. "And there are certain ones in this place that will keep it in the air. Now I didn't sass that mesmerist. But I got it about as tough as you did. I'll bet a thousand to one that Bat Reeves is gettin' back at me for cuttin' him out with the widder. It's reasonable," he declared, warming to the topic and checking items off on his stubby fingers. "Here's your mesmerist rushin' hot to Reeves complainin' about you and gettin' a permit from Reeves, along with a few pointers about you for occult use. Reeves hates you bad enough, but he hates me worse. And he sees to it that I get occulted, too. He ain't lettin' a chance like that slip past as soon as that perfessor lets him see what occultin' will do to a man. Why, condemn his hide and haslet, I believe he swapped that permit for a dose of so much occultin'—and I've got the dose."

"I should hate at my age to have to start in and go to sea again," mourned the Cap'n, after long meditation; "but I reckon I'll either have to do that or go up in a balloon and stay there. There's too many tricks for me on land. They ring in all they can think of themselves, and then they go to work and get a ghost to help. I can't whale the daylights out of the ghost, and I don't suppose it would be proper for a first selectman to cuff the ears of the woman that said females was followin' me, wailin' and gnashin' their teeth, but I can lick that yaller-fingered, cigarette-suckin' dude, and pay the fine for so doin'—and reckon I've got my money's worth."

"You need a guardeen," snorted Hiram. "She will put on her robe and accuse you of havin' the ghost of a murdered man a-chasin' you."

The Cap'n grew white under his tan at this remark, made by Hiram in all guilelessness, and the memory of a certain Portuguese sailor, slipped overboard after a brief but busy mutiny, went shuddering through his thoughts.

"Ain't got anything like that on your conscience, have you?" demanded the old showman, bluntly.

"She didn't say anything only about women, did she?" evaded the Cap'n.

"Didn't notice anything last night. She may be savin' something else for this evenin'," was Hiram's consoling answer. His air and the baleful glance he bent on his neighbor indicated that he still held that irascible gentleman responsible for their joint misfortune. And, to show further displeasure, he whirled and stumped away across the fields toward his home.

Cap'n Aaron Sproul attended the show at the town hall that evening.

He went alone, after his wife had plaintively sighed her refusal to accompany him. He hadn't intended to go. But he was drawn by a certain fatal fascination. He had a sailor's superstitious half-belief in the supernatural. He had caught word during the day of some astonishing revelations made by the seeress as to other persons in town, either by lucky guess or through secret pre-information, as his common sense told him. And yet his sneaking superstition whispered that there was "something in it, after all." If that mesmerist's spirit of retaliation should carry him to the extent of hinting about that Portuguese sailor, Cap'n Sproul resolved to be in that hall, ready to stand up and beard his defamers.

Evidently Professor Derolli spotted his enemy; for Madame Dawn, in order that vengeance should be certain of its mark, repeated the vague yet perfectly obvious hints of the preceding evening; and Cap'n Sproul was thankful for the mystic gloom of the hall that hid his fury and his shame. He stole out of the place while the lights were still low. He feared for his self-restraint if he were to remain, and he realized what a poor figure he would make standing up there and replying to the malicious farrago of the woman under the veil.

For the rest of the professor's engagement Cap'n Aaron Sproul and Hiram Look kept sullenly to their castles, nursing indignant sense of their wrongs. They got an occasional whiff of the scandal that was pursuing their names. Though their respective wives strove with pathetic loyalty to disbelieve all that the seeress had hinted at, and moved in sad silence about their duties, it was plain that the seed of evil had been planted deep in their imaginations. Poor human nature is only what it is, after all!

"Two better women never lived than them of ourn, and two that would be harder to turn," said Hiram to the Cap'n, "but it wouldn't be human nature if they didn't wonder sometimes what we'd been up to all them years before we showed up here, and what that cussed occulter said has torched 'em on to thinkin' mighty hard. The only thing to do is to keep a stiff upper lip and wait till the clouds roll by. They'll come to their senses and be ashamed of themselves, give 'em time and rope enough."

Second Selectman Batson Reeves busied himself as a sort of master of ceremonies for Professor Derolli, acted as committee of investigation when the professor's "stock subject" remained for a day and night in a shallow trench in the village cemetery, and even gave them the best that his widower's house could afford at a Sunday dinner.

In the early flush of an August morning about a week after the departure of the hypnotic marvel and his companions, a mutual impulse seemed to actuate Selectman Sproul and Hiram Look at a moment surprisingly simultaneous. They started out their back doors, took the path leading over the hill between their farms, and met under the poplars at a point almost exactly half-way. It would be difficult to state which face expressed the most of embarrassed concern as they stood silently gazing at each other.

"I was comin' over to your house," said Hiram.

"I was startin' for yourn," said the Cap'n.

Then both, like automatons pulled by the same string, dove hand into breast-pocket and pulled out a crumpled letter.

"Well, I'll be dummed!" quoth the two in one voice.

"I don't understand northin' about it," said Hiram, plaintively. "But whatever it is, it has put me in a devil of a fix."

"If you're havin' any more trouble to your house than I'm havin' over to mine, then you've somethin' that I don't begrudge you none," added the Cap'n, gloomily.

"Woman left it," related Hiram. "It was in the edge of the evenin', and I hadn't come in from the barn. Woman throwed it onto the piazza and run. Reckon she waited her chance so't my wife would get holt of it. She did. She read it. And it's hell 'n' repeat on the Look premises."

"Ditto and the same, word for word," said the Cap'n.

"The handwritin' ain't much different," said the ex-showman, clutching Sproul's letter and comparing the two sheets. "But it's wimmen's work with a pen—there ain't no gettin' round that."

Then his voice broke into quavering rage as he went on.

"You jest think of a lovin', trustin', and confidin' woman gettin' holt of a gob of p'isen like that!" He shook the crackling sheet over his head. "'Darlin' Hiram, how could you leave me, but if you will come away with me now all will be forgiven and forgotten, from one who loves you truly and well, and has followed you to remind you of your promise.' My Gawd, Cap'n, ain't that something to raise a blister on the motto, 'God Bless Our Home'?"

"It's done it over to my house," said the Cap'n, lugubriously.

"There never was any such woman—there never could have been any such woman," Hiram went on in fervid protest. "There ain't nobody with a license to chase me up."

"Ditto and the same," chimed in Cap'n Sproul.

"No one!"

"No one!" echoed the Cap'n.

They stood and looked at each other a little while, and then their eyes shifted in some embarrassment.

"Of course," said Hiram, at last, moderating his tone of indignation, "when a man ain't had no anchor he might have showed attentions such as ladies expect from gents, and sometimes rash promises is made. Now, perhaps—you understand I'm only supposin'—perhaps you've got some one in mind that might have misjudged what you said to her—some one that's got a little touched in her head, perhaps, and she's come here. In that case it might give us a clue if you're a mind to own up."

The Cap'n flushed at this clumsy attempt of Hiram to secure a confidence.

"Seein' that you've thought how it might be done all so quick and handy, showin' what's on your mind, I reckon you'd better lay down cards first," he said, significantly.

"I think it's jest a piece of snigdom by some one tryin' to hurt us," proceeded Hiram, boring the Cap'n with inquisitive gaze. "But you never can tell what's what in this world, and so long as we're looking for clues we might as well have an understandin', so's to see if there's any such thing as two wimmen meetin' accidental and comparin' notes and gettin' their heads together."

"None for me," said the Cap'n, but he said it falteringly.

"Well, there's none for me, either, but there's such a thing as havin' what you've said misjudged by wimmen. Where the wimmen ain't strong-headed, you know." He hesitated for a time, fiddling his forefinger under his nose. "There was just one woman I made talk to in my life such as a gent shouldn't have made without backin' it up. If she'd been stronger in her head I reckon she'd have realized that bein' sick, like I was, and not used to wimmen, and bein' so grateful for all her care and attention and kindness and head-rubbin', I was sort of took unawares, as you might say. A stronger-headed woman would have said to herself that it wasn't to be laid up against me. But as soon as I got to settin' up and eatin' solid food I could see that she was sappy, and prob'ly wanted to get out of nussin' and get married, and so she had it all written down on her nuss-diary what I said, mixed in with temperature, pulse, and things. I—"

Cap'n Sproul's eyes had been widening, and his tongue was nervously licking wisps of whisker between his lips.

"Was that in a Bost'n horsepittle?" he asked, with eager interest.

"That's where. In the fall three years ago. Pneumony."

"Mine was rheumatic fever two years ago," said the Cap'n. "It's what drove me off'm deep water. She was fat, wasn't she, and had light hair and freckles across the bridge of her nose, and used to set side of the bed and hum: 'I'm a pilgrim, faint and weary'?"

"Damme if you didn't ring the bell with that shot!" cried the old showman in astonishment.

"Well, it's just ditto and the same with me," said the Cap'n, rapping his knuckles on his breast. "Same horsepittle, same nuss, same thing generally—only when I was sickest I told her I had property wuth about thutty thousand dollars."

"So did I," announced Hiram. "It's funny that when a man's drunk or sick he's got to tell first comers all he knows, and a good deal more!" He ran his eyes up and down over Cap'n Sproul with fresh interest. "If that don't beat tophet! You and me both at that horsepittle and gettin' mixed up with the same woman!"

"This world ain't got no special bigness," said the Cap'n. "I've sailed round it a dozen times, and I know."

The showman grasped the selectman by the coat-lapel and demanded earnestly: "Didn't you figger it as I did, when you got so you could set up and take notice, that she wasn't all right in her head?"

"Softer'n a jelly-fish!" declared the Cap'n, with unction.

"Then she's got crazier, and up all of a sudden and followed us—and don't care which one she gets!"

"Or else got sensibler and remembered our property and come around to let blood."

"Bound to make trouble, anyway."

"She's made it!" The Cap'n turned doleful gaze over his shoulder at the chimney of his house.

"Bein' crazy she can make a lot more of it. I tell you, Cap'n, there's only this to do, and it ought to work with wimmen-folks as sensible as our'n are. We'll swap letters, and go back home and tell the whole story and set ourselves straight. They're bound to see the right side of it."

"There ain't any reckonin' on what a woman will do," observed the Cap'n, gloomily. "The theory of tellin' the truth sounds all right, and is all right, of course. But I read somewhere, once, that a woman thrives best on truth diluted with a little careful and judicious lyin'. And the feller seemed to know what he was talkin' about."

"It's the truth for me this time," cried Hiram, stoutly.

"Well, then, ditto and the same for me. But if it's comin' on to blow, we might as well get another anchor out. I'll start Constable Denslow 'round town to see what he can see. If he's sly enough and she's still here he prob'ly can locate her. And if he can scare her off, so much the better."

Constable Denslow, intrusted with only scant and vague information, began his search for a supposed escaped lunatic that day. Before nightfall he reported to the Cap'n that there were no strangers in town. However, right on the heels of that consoling information came again that terror who travelled by night! In the dusk of early evening another letter was left for Aaron Sproul, nor was the domicile of Hiram Look slighted by the mysterious correspondent.

Moved by common impulse the victims met in the path across the fields next morning.

"Another one of them bumbs dropped at my house last night!" stated Hiram, though the expression on his countenance had rendered that information superfluous.

"Ditto and the same," admitted the Cap'n. "Haven't brought yourn, have you?"

"Wife's holdin' onto it for evidence when she gets her bill of divorce," said Hiram.

"Ditto with me," affirmed Cap'n Sproul. "Tellin' mine the truth was what really started her mad up. It was just plain mystery up to that time, and she only felt sorry. When I told her the truth she said if it was that bad it would prob'ly turn out to be worse, and so long's I'd owned up to a part of it I'd better go ahead and tell the rest, and so on! And now she won't believe anything I try to tell her."

"Same over to my place," announced his despondent friend.

"It's your own cussed fault," blazed the Cap'n. "My notion was to lie to 'em. You can make a lie smooth and convincin'. The truth of this thing sounds fishy. It would sound fishy to me if I didn't know it was so."

"Since I got out of the circus business I've been tryin' to do business with less lyin', but it doesn't seem to work," mourned Hiram. "Maybe what's good for the circus business is good for all kinds. Seems to be that way! Well, when you'd told her the straight truth and had been as square as you could, what did you say to her when she flared up?"

"Northin'," answered the Cap'n. "Didn't seem to be northin' to say to fit the case."

"Not after the way they took the truth when it was offered to 'em," agreed Hiram. "I didn't say anything out loud. I said it to myself, and it would have broke up the party if a little bird had twittered it overhead at a Sunday-school picnic."

That day Jackson Denslow, pricked by a fee of ten dollars, made more searching investigation. It was almost a census. Absolutely no trace of such a stranger! Denslow sullenly said that such a domiciliary visit was stirring up a lot of talk, distrust, and suspicion, and, as he couldn't answer any questions as to who she was, where she came from, and what was wanted of her, nor hint as to who his employers were, it was currently stated that he had gone daffy over the detective business. His tone of voice indicated that he thought others were similarly afflicted. He allowed that no detective could detect until he had all the facts.

He demanded information and sneered when it was not given.

It was an unfortunate attitude to take toward men, the triggers of whose tempers had been cocked by such events as had beset Hiram Look and Aaron Sproul. Taking it that the constable was trying to pry into their business in order to regale the public on their misfortunes, Hiram threw a town-ledger at him, and the Cap'n kicked at him as he fled through the door of the office.

That night each was met at the front door by hysterics, and a third letter. The mystery was becoming eerie.

"Dang rabbit her miserable pelt!" growled Hiram at the despairing morning conference under the poplars. "She must be livin' in a hole round here, or else come in a balloon. I tell you, Cap'n Sproul, it's got to be stopped some way or the two families will be in the lunatic asylum inside of a week."

"Or more prob'ly in the divorce court. Louada Murilla vows and declares she'll get a bill if I don't tell her the truth, and when you've told the truth once and sworn to it, and it don't stick, what kind of a show is a lie goin' to stand, when a man ain't much of a liar?"

"If she's goin' to be caught we've got to catch her," insisted Hiram. "She's crazy, or else she wouldn't be watchin' for us to leave the house so as to grab in and toss one of them letters. Looks to me it's just revenge, and to make trouble. The darned fool can't marry both of us. I didn't sleep last night—not with that woman of mine settin' and boohooin'. I just set and thought. And the result of the thinkin' is that we'll take our valises to-day and march to the railroad-station in the face and eyes of everybody so that it will get spread round that we've gone. And we'll come back by team from some place down the line, and lay low either round your premises or mine and ketch that infernal, frowzle-headed sister of Jim the Penman by the hind leg and snap her blasted head off."

"What be you goin' to tell the wimmen?"

"Tell 'em northin'."

"There'll be the devil to pay. They'll think we're elopin'."

"Well, let 'em think," said Hiram, stubbornly. "They can't do any harder thinkin' than I've been thinkin', and they can't get a divorce in one night. When we ketch that woman we can preach a sermon to 'em with a text, and she'll be the text."

Cap'n Sproul sighed and went for his valise.

"What she said to me as I come away curled the leaves in the front yard," confided Hiram, as they walked together down the road.

"Ditto and the same," mourned the Cap'n.

At dusk that evening they dismounted from a Vienna livery-hitch on a back road in Smyrna, paid the driver and dismissed the team, and started briskly through the pastures across lots toward Hiram Look's farm.

An hour later, moving with the stealth of red Indians, they posted themselves behind the stone wall opposite the lane leading into the Look dooryard. They squatted there breathing stertorously, their eyes goggling into the night.

The Cap'n, with vision trained by vigils at sea, was the first to see the dim shape approaching. When she had come nearer they saw a tall feather nodding against the dim sky.

"Let's get her before she throws the letter—get her with the goods on her!" breathed Hiram, huskily. And when she was opposite they leaped the stone wall.

She had seasonable alarm, for several big stones rolled off the wall's top. And she turned and ran down the road with the two men pounding along fiercely in pursuit.

"My Gawd!" gasped Aaron, after a dozen rods; "talk about—gayzelles—she's—she's—"

He didn't finish the sentence, preferring to save his breath.

But skirts are an awkward encumbrance in a sprinting match. Hiram, with longer legs than the pudgy Cap'n, drew ahead and overhauled the fugitive foot by foot. And at sound of his footsteps behind her, and his hoarse grunt, "I've got ye!" she whirled and, before the amazed showman could protect himself, she struck out and knocked him flat on his back. But when she turned again to run she stepped on her skirt, staggered forward dizzily, and fell in a heap. The next instant the Cap'n tripped over Hiram, tumbled heavily, rolled over twice, and brought up against the prostrate fugitive, whom he clutched in a grasp there was no breaking.

"Don't let her hit ye," howled Hiram, struggling up. "She's got an arm like a mule's hind leg."

"And whiskers like a goat!" bawled the Cap'n, choking in utter astonishment. "Strike a match and let's see what kind of a blamenation catfish this is, anyhow."

And a moment later, the Cap'n's knees still on the writhing figure, they beheld, under the torn veil, by the glimmer of the match, the convulsed features of Batson Reeves, second selectman of the town of Smyrna.

"Well, marm," remarked Hiram, after a full thirty seconds of amazed survey, "you've sartinly picked out a starry night for a ramble."

Mr. Reeves seemed to have no language for reply except some shocking oaths.

"That ain't very lady-like talk," protested Look, lighting another match that he might gloat still further. "You ought to remember that you're in the presence of your two 'darlin's.' We can't love any one that cusses. You'll be smokin' a pipe or chawin' tobacker next." He chuckled, and then his voice grew hard. "Stop your wigglin', you blasted, livin' scarecrow, or I'll split your head with a rock, and this town will call it good reddance. Roll him over onto his face, Cap'n Sproul."

A generous strip of skirt, torn off by Reeves's boot, lay on the ground. Hiram seized it and bound the captive's arms behind his back. "Now let him up, Cap," he commanded, and the two men helped the unhappy selectman to his feet.

"So it's you, hey?" growled Hiram, facing him. "Because I've come here to this town and found a good woman and married her, and saved her from bein' fooled into marryin' a skunk like you, you've put up this job, hey? Because Cap'n Sproul has put you where you belong in town business, you're tryin' to do him, too, hey? What do you reckon we're goin' to do with you?"

It was evident that Mr. Reeves was not prepared to state. He maintained a stubborn silence.

Cap'n Sproul had picked up the hat with the tall feather and was gingerly revolving it in his hands.

"You're a nice widderer, you are!" snorted Hiram. "A man that will wear a deceased's clothes in order to help him break up families and spread sorrow and misery round a neighborhood, would be a second husband to make a woman both proud and pleased. Cap'n, put that hat and veil back onto him. I'll hold him."

Mr. Reeves consented to stand still only after he had received a half-dozen open-handed buffets that made his head ring.

"There!" ejaculated Hiram, after the Cap'n's unaccustomed fingers had arranged the head-gear. "Bein' that you're dressed for company, we'll make a few calls. Grab a-holt, Cap'n."

"I'll die in my tracks right here, first," squalled Reeves, guessing their purpose. But he was helpless in their united clutch. They rushed him up the lane, tramped along the piazza noisily, jostled through the front door, and presented him before Hiram's astounded wife.

"Mis' Look," said her husband, "here's the lady that's in love with me, and that has been leavin' me letters. It bein' the same lady that was once in love with you, I reckon you'll appreciate my feelin's in the matter. There's just one more clue that we need to clinch this thing—and that's another one of those letters. The Cap'n and I don't know how to find a pocket in a woman's dress. We're holdin' this lady. You hunt for the pocket, Mis' Look."

The amazement on her comely face changed to sudden and indignant enlightenment.

"The miserable scalawag!" she cried. The next instant, with one thrust of her hand, she had the damning evidence. There were two letters.

"She ain't delivered the one to darlin' Cap'n Sproul this evenin'," Hiram remarked, persisting still in his satiric use of the feminine pronoun. "If you'll put on your bonnet, Mis' Look, we'll all sa'nter acrost to the Cap'n's and see that Louada Murilla gets hers. Near's I can find out, the rules of this special post-office is that all love-letters to us pass through our wives' hands."

In the presence of Mrs. Sproul, after the excitement of the dramatic entrance had subsided, the unhappy captive attempted excuses, cringing pitifully.

"I didn't think of it all by myself," he bleated. "It was what the Dawn woman said, and then when I mentioned that I had some grudges agin' the same parties she wrote the notes, and the perfessor planned the rest, so't we could both get even. But it wasn't my notion. I reckon he mesmerized me into it. I ain't to blame. Them mesmerists has awful powers."

"Ya-a-a-as, that's probably just the way of it!" sneered Hiram, with blistering sarcasm. "But you'll be unmesmerized before we get done with you. There's nothin' like makin' a good job of your cure, seein' that you was unfort'nit' enough to get such a dose of it that it's lasted you a week. Grab him, Cap'n."

"What be ye goin' to do now?" quavered Reeves.

"Take you down into the village square, and, as foreman of the Ancient and Honer'ble Firemen's Association, I'll ring the bell and call out the department, stand you up in front of them all in your flounces fine, and tell 'em what you've been doin' to their chief. I guess all the heavy work of gettin' even with you will be taken off'm my hands after that."

Reeves groaned.

"As first selectman," broke in the Cap'n, "and interested in keepin' bad characters out of town, I shall suggest that they take and ride you into Vienny on a rail."

"With my fife and drum corps ahead," shouted Hiram, warming to the possibilities.

"I'll die here in my tracks first!" roared the captive.

"It's kind of apparent that Madame Dawn didn't give you lessons in prophesyin', along with the rest of her instruction," remarked Hiram. "That makes twice this evenin' that you've said you were goin' to die, and you're still lookin' healthy. Come along! Look happy, for you're goin' to be queen of the May, mother!"

But when they started to drag him from the room both women interposed.

"Hiram, dear," pleaded his wife, "please let the man go. Louada Murilla and I know now what a scalawag he is, and we know how we've misjudged both you and Cap'n Sproul, and we'll spend the rest of our lives showin' you that we're sorry. But let him go! If you make any such uproar as you're talkin' of it will all come out that he made your wives believe that you were bad men. It will shame us to death, Hiram. Please let him go."

"Please let him go, Aaron," urged Mrs. Sproul, with all the fervor of her feelings. "It will punish him worst if you drop him here and now, like a snake that you've picked up by mistake."

Cap'n Sproul and Hiram Look stared at each other a long time, meditating. They went apart and mumbled in colloquy. Then the Cap'n trudged to his front door, opened it, and held it open. Hiram cut the strip that bound their captive's wrists.

The second selectman had not the courage to raise his eyes to meet the stares directed on him. With head bowed and the tall feather nodding over his face he slunk out into the night. And Hiram and the Cap'n called after him in jovial chorus:

"Good-night, marm!"

"This settling down in life seems to be more or less of a complicated performance," observed Cap'n Sproul when the four of them were alone, "but just at this minute I feel pretty well settled. I reckon I've impressed it on a few disturbers in this town that I'm the sort of a man that's better left alone. It looks to me like a long, calm spell of weather ahead."

Mr. Gammon's entrance into the office of the first selectman of Smyrna was unobtrusive. In fact, to employ a paradox, it was so unobtrusive as to be almost spectacular.

The door opened just about wide enough to admit a cat, were that cat sufficiently slab-sided, and Mr. Gammon slid his lath-like form in edgewise. He stood beside the door after he had shut it softly behind him. He gazed forlornly at Cap'n Aaron Sproul, first selectman. Outside sounded a plaintive "Squawnk!"

Cap'n Sproul at that moment had his fist up ready to spack it down into his palm to add emphasis to some particularly violent observation he was just then making to Mr. Tate, highway "surveyor" in Tumble-dick District. Cap'n Sproul jerked his chin around over his shoulder so as to stare at Mr. Gammon, and held his fist poised in air.

"Squawnk!" repeated the plaintive voice outside.

Mr. Gammon had a head narrowed in the shape of an old-fashioned coffin, and the impression it produced was fully as doleful. His neighbors in that remote section of Smyrna known as "Purgatory," having the saving grace of humor, called him "Cheerful Charles."

The glare in the Cap'n's eyes failed to dislodge him, and the Cap'n's mind was just then too intent on a certain topic to admit even the digression of ordering Mr. Gammon out.

"What in the name of Josephus Priest do I care what the public demands?" he continued, shoving his face toward the lowering countenance of Mr. Tate. "I've built our end of the road to the town-line accordin' to the line of survey that's best for this town, and now if Vienny ain't got a mind to finish their road to strike the end of our'n, then let the both of 'em yaw apart and end in the sheep-pastur'. The public ain't runnin' this. It's me—the first selectman. You are takin' orders from me—and you want to understand it. Don't you nor any one else move a shovelful of dirt till I tell you to."

Hiram Look, retired showman and steady loafer in the selectman's office, rolled his long cigar across his lips and grunted indorsement.

"Squawnk!" The appeal outside was a bit more insistent.

Mr. Gammon sighed. Hiram glanced his way and noted that he had a noose of clothes-line tied so tightly about his neck that his flabby dewlap was pinched. He carried the rest of the line in a coil on his arm.

"Public says—" Mr. Tate began to growl.

"Well, what does public say?"

"Public that has to go around six miles by crossro'ds to git into Vienny says that you wa'n't elected to be no crowned head nor no Seizer of Rooshy!" Mr. Tate, stung by memories of the taunts flung at him as surveyor, grew angry in his turn. "I live out there, and I have to take the brunt of it. They think you and that old fool of a Vienny selectman that's lettin' a personal row ball up the bus'ness of two towns are both bedeviled."

"She's prob'ly got it over them, too," enigmatically observed Mr. Gammon, in a voice as hollow as wind in a knot-hole.

This time the outside "Squawnk" was so imperious that Mr. Gammon opened the door. In waddled the one who had been demanding admittance.

"It's my tame garnder," said Mr. Gammon, apologetically. "He was lonesome to be left outside."

A fuzzy little cur that had been sitting between Mr. Tate's earth-stained boots ran at the gander and yapped shrilly. The big bird curved his neck, bristled his feathers, and hissed.

"Kick 'em out of here!" snapped the Cap'n, indignantly.

"Any man that's soft-headed enough to have a gander followin' him round everywhere he goes ought to have a guardeen appointed," suggested Mr. Tate, acidulously, after he had recovered his dog and had cuffed his ears.

"My garnder is a gent side of any low-lived dog that ever gnawed carrion," retorted Mr. Gammon, his funereal gloom lifting to show one flash of resentment.

"Look here!" sputtered the Cap'n, "this ain't any Nat'ral History Convention. Shut up, I tell ye, the two of you! Now, Tate, you can up killick and set sail for home. I've given you your course, and don't you let her off one point. You tell the public of this town, and you can stand on the town-line and holler it acrost into Vienny, that the end of that road stays right there."

Mr. Tate, his dog under his arm, paused at the door to fling over his shoulder another muttered taunt about "bedevilment," and disappeared.

"Now, old button on a graveyard gate, what do you want?" demanded Cap'n Sproul, running eye of great disfavor over Mr. Gammon and his faithful attendant. He had heard various reports concerning this widower recluse of Purgatory, and was prepared to dislike him.

"I reckoned she'd prob'ly have it over you, too," said Mr. Gammon, drearily. "It's like her to aim for shinin' marks."

Cap'n Sproul blinked at him, and then turned dubious gaze on Hiram, who leaned back against the whitewashed wall, nesting his head comfortably in his locked fingers.

"If she's bedeviled me and bedeviled you, there ain't no tellin' where she'll stop," Mr. Gammon went on. "And you bein' more of a shinin' mark, it will be worse for you."

"Look here," said the first selectman, squaring his elbows on the table and scowling on "Cheerful Charles," "if you've come to me to get papers to commit you to the insane horsepittle, you've proved your case. You needn't say another word. If it's any other business, get it out of you, and then go off and take a swim with your old web-foot—there!"

Mr. Gammon concealed any emotion that the slur provoked. He came along to the table and tucked a paper under the Cap'n's nose.

"There's what Squire Alcander Reeves wrote off for me, and told me to hand it to you. He said it would show you your duty."

The selectman stared up at Mr. Gammon when he uttered the hateful name of Reeves. Mr. Gammon twisted the noose on his neck so that the knot would come under his ear, and endured the stare with equanimity.

With spectacles settled on a nose that wrinkled irefully, the Cap'n perused the paper, his eyes growing bigger. Then he looked at the blank back of the sheet, stared wildly at Mr. Gammon, and whirled to face his friend Look.

"Hiram," he blurted, "you listen to this: 'Pers'nally appeared before me this fifteenth day of September Charles Gammon, of Smyrna, and deposes and declares that by divers arts, charms, spells, and magic, incantations, and evil hocus-pocus, one—one—'"

"Arizima," prompted Mr. Gammon, mournfully. The Cap'n gazed on him balefully, and resumed:

"'One Arizima Orff has bewitched and bedeviled him, his cattle, his chattels, his belongings, including one calf, one churn, and various ox-chains. It is therefore the opinion of the court that the first selectman of Smyrna, as chief municipal officer, should investigate this case under the law made and provided for the detection of witches, and for that purpose I have put this writing in the hands of Mr. Gammon that he may summon the proper authority, same being first selectman aforesaid.'"

"That is just how he said it to me," confirmed "Cheerful Charles." "He said that it was a thing for the selectman to take hold of without a minute's delay. I wish you'd get your hat and start for my place now and forthwith."

Cap'n Sproul paid no attention to the request. He was searching the face of Hiram with eyes in which the light was growing lurid.

"I'm goin' over to his office and hosswhip him, and I want you to come along and see me do it." He crumpled the paper into a ball, threw it into a corner, and stumped to the window.

"It's just as I reckoned," he raged. "He was lookin' out to see how the joke worked. I see him dodge back. He's behind the curtain in his office." Again he whirled on Hiram. "After what the Reeves family has tried to do to us," he declared, with a flourish of his arm designed to call up in Mr. Look's soul all the sour memories of things past, "he's takin' his life in his hands when he starts in to make fun of me with a lunatic and a witch-story."

Mr. Gammon had recovered the dishonored document, and was smoothing it on the table.

"That's twice you've called me a lunatic," he remonstrated. "You call me that again, and you'll settle for slander! Now, I've come here with an order from the court, and your duty is laid before you. When a town officer has sworn to do his duty and don't do it, a citizen can make it hot for him." Mr. Gammon, his bony hands caressing his legal document, was no longer apologetic. "Be you goin' to do your duty—yes or no?"

"If—if—you ain't a—say, what have you got that rope around your neck for?" demanded the first selectman.

"To show to the people that if I ain't protected from persecution and relieved of my misery by them that's in duty bound to do the same, I'll go out and hang myself—and the blame will then be placed where it ought to be placed," declared Mr. Gammon, shaking a gaunt finger at the Cap'n.

As a man of hard common sense the Cap'n wanted to pounce on the paper, tear it up, announce his practical ideas on the witchcraft question, and then kick Mr. Gammon and his gander into the middle of the street. But as town officer he gazed at the end of that monitory finger and took second thought.

And as he pondered, Hiram Look broke in with a word.

"I know it looks suspicious, comin' from a Reeves," said he, "but I hardly see anything about it to start your temper so, Cap."

"Why, he might just as well have sent me a writin' to go out and take a census of the hossflies between here and the Vienny town-line," sputtered the first selectman; "or catch the moskeeters in Snell's bog and paint 'em red, white, and blue. I tell you, it's a dirty, sneakin', underhand way of gettin' me laughed at."

"I ain't a humorous man myself, and there ain't no—" began Mr. Gammon.

"Shut up!" bellowed the Cap'n. "It was only last week, Hiram, that that old gob of cat-meat over there that calls himself a lawyer said I'd taken this job of selectman as a license to stick my nose into everybody's business in town. Now, here he is, rigging me out with a balloon-jib and stays'ls"—he pointed a quivering finger at the paper that Mr. Gammon was nursing—"and sendin' me off on a tack that will pile me up on Fool Rocks. Everybody can say it of me, then—that I'm stickin' my nose in. Because there ain't any witches, and never was any witches."

"Ain't witches?" squealed Mr. Gammon. "Why, you—"

But Hiram checked the outburst with flapping palm.

"Here!" he cried. "The two of you wait just a minute. Keep right still until I come back. Don't say a word to each other. It will only be wasting breath."

He went out, and they heard him clumping up the stairs into the upper part of the town house.

He came back with several books in the hook of his arm and found the two mute and not amiable. He surveyed them patronizingly, after he had placed the books on the table.

"Gents, once when I was considerably younger and consequently reckoned that I knew about all there was to know, not only all the main points, but all the foot-notes, I didn't allow anybody else to know anything. And I used to lose more or less money betting that this and that wasn't so. Then up would come the fellow with the cyclopedy and his facts and his figgers. At last I was so sure of one thing that I bet a thousand on it, and a fellow hit me over the head with every cyclopedy printed since the time Noah waited for the mud to dry. I got my lesson! After that I took my tip from the men that have spent time findin' out. I'm more or less of a fool now, but before that I was such a fool that I didn't know that I didn't know enough to know that I didn't know."

"What did you bet on?" inquired the Cap'n, with a gleam of interest.

"None of your business!" snapped Hiram, a red flush on his cheek. "But if I'd paid more attention to geography in my school than I did to tamin' toads and playin' circus I wouldn't have bet."

He opened one of the books that he had secured in his trip to the town library.

"Now, you say offhand, Cap, that there never was such a thing as a witch. Well, right here are the figgers to show that between 1482 and 1784 more than three hundred thousand wimmen were put to death in Europe for bein' witches. There's the facts under 'Witches' in your own town cyclopedy."

Cap'n Sproul did not appear to be convinced.

"There it is, down in black and white," persisted Hiram. "Now, how about there never bein' any witches?" He tapped his finger on the open page.

"If the book says that, witches must be extinker than dodos. Your cyclopedy don't say anything about any of 'em gettin' away and comin' over to this country, does it?"

"Of course we've had 'em in this country," said Hiram, opening another book. "Caught 'em by the dozen in Salem! Cotton Mather made a business of it. You don't think a man like Cotton Mather is lettin' himself be fooled on the witch question, do you? Here's the book he wrote. A man that's as pious as Cotton Mather ain't makin' up lies and writin' 'em down, and puttin' himself on record."

"There's just as many witches to-day as there ever was," cried the corroborative Mr. Gammon. "The trouble is they ain't hunted out and brought to book for their infernal actions. There's hundreds and hundreds of folks goin' through this life pestered all the time with trouble that's made for 'em by a witch, and they don't know what's the matter with 'em. But they can't fool me. I know witches when I see 'em. And when she turns herself into a cat and—"

"Does what?" demanded the Cap'n, testily.

"Why, it wa'n't more'n three nights ago that I heard her yowlin' away in my barn chamber, and there she was, turned into a cat most as big as a ca'f, and I throwed an iron kittle at her and she come right through the bottom of it like it was a paper hoop. There, now! What have you got to say to that?"

"That you are about as handy a liar as I ever had stand up in front of me," returned the Cap'n, with animation. He whirled on Hiram and gesticulated at the books. "Do you mean to tell me that you're standin' in with him on any such jing-bedoozled, blame' foolishness as this? I took you to be man-grown."

"It's always easy enough to r'ar up in this world and blart that things ain't so," snapped Hiram, with some heat. "Fools do that thing right along. I don't want you to be that kind. Live and learn."

"Witches or no witches, cyclopedy or no cyclopedy, what I want to know is, do you want to have it passed round this community that the two of us set here—men that have been round this world as much as we have—and heard a man tell a cat-and-kittle story like that, and lapped it down? They'll be here sellin' us counterfeit money and gold bricks next."

Hiram blinked a little doubtfully at Mr. Gammon, and his rope and gander, and probably, under ordinary circumstances, would have flouted that gentleman. But the authority of the encyclopedia gave his naturally disputatious nature a stimulus not to be resisted. Beating the page with the back of his hand, he assembled his proof that there had been witches, that there are witches, and that there will be more witches in the future. And he wound up by declaring that Mr. Gammon probably knew what he was talking about—a statement that Mr. Gammon indorsed with a spirited tale of how his ox-chains had been turned into mighty serpents in his dooryard, and had thrashed around there all night to his unutterable distress and alarm. Again he demanded investigation of his case, and protection by the authorities.

In this appeal he was backed by Hiram, who volunteered his assistance in making the investigation. And in the end, Cap'n Sproul, as first selectman of Smyrna, consented to visit the scene of alleged enchantment in "Purgatory," though as private citizen he criticised profanely the state of mind that allowed him to go on such an errand. He gnawed his beard, and a flush of something like shame settled on his cheek. It seemed to him that he was allowing himself to be cajoled into a mild spree of lunacy.

"And there bein' no time like the present, and my horse bein' hitched out there in the shed," advised Hiram, briskly, "why not go now? Did you ride out from your place or walk?" he inquired of "Cheerful Charles."

"Walked," replied Mr. Gammon, dejectedly. "My hoss is bewitched, too. Can't get him out of the stable."

"We'll take you along with us," was Hiram's kindly proffer.

"Him and that gander?" protested the Cap'n.

"I can set in behind with the garnder under my arm," urged Mr. Gammon, meekly.

The Cap'n came around the table and angrily twitched the rope off Mr. Gammon's neck. That much concession to the convenances he demanded with a vigor that his doleful constituent did not gainsay.

When they drove away the baleful eye of the first selectman spied Squire Alcander Reeves furtively regarding them through the dingy glass of his office window.

"Me off witch-chasin' and him standin' there grinnin' at it like a jezeboo!" he gritted. And he surveyed, with no very gracious regard, his companions in this unspeakable quest.

When they were well out of the village Mr. Gammon twisted his neck and sought to impart more information over the back of the seat.

"I tell you, she's a cooler when it comes to bedevilin'. She had an old Leghorn hen that a mink killed just after the hen had brought out a brood of chickens. And what do you s'pose she done? Why, she went right to work and put a cluck onto the cat, and the cat has brooded 'em ever since."

The Cap'n emitted a snort of disgust.

"And here we are, two sensible men, ridin' around over this town an' tryin' to make head and tail out of such guff as that! Do you pretend to tell me for one minute, Hiram Look, that you take any kind of stock in this sort of thing? Now, just forget that cyclopedy business and your ancient history for a few minutes and be honest. Own up that you were arguin' to hear yourself talk, and that you're dragging me out here to pass away the time."

Hiram scratched his nose and admitted that now the Cap'n had asked for friendly candor, he really didn't take much stock in witches.

"There! I knew it!" cried the selectman, with unction and relief. "And now that you've had your joke and done with it, let's dump out old coffin-mug and his gander and turn round and go back about our business."

But Hiram promptly whipped along.

"Oh, thunder!" he ejaculated. "While we're about it, we might as well see it through. My curiosity is sort of stirred up."

The Cap'n was angry in good earnest again.

"Curiosity!" he snarled. "Now you've named it. I wouldn't own up to bein' such a pickid-nosed old maid as that, not for a thousand dollars!"

Hiram was wholly unruffled.

"How do you suppose any one ever knew enough to write a cyclopedy," said he, "if they didn't go investigate and find out? They went official, just as we are goin' now."

Hiram seemed to take much content in that phase of the situation, feeling that mere personal inquisitiveness was dignified in this case under the aegis of law and authority. It was exactly this view of the matter that most disturbed Cap'n Aaron Sproul, for that hateful Pharisee, Squire Reeves, had supplied the law to compel his own authority as selectman.

He sat with elbows on his knees, gloomily surveying a dim reflection of himself in the dasher of Hiram's wagon. In pondering on the trammels of responsibility the sour thought occurred to him, as it had many times in the past year, that commanding a town was a different proposition from being ruler of the Jefferson P. Benn on the high seas—with the odds in favor of the Benn.

The Cap'n had never visited that retired part of the town called "Purgatory." He found Mr. Gammon's homestead to be a gray and unkempt farm-house from which the weather had scrubbed the paint. The front yard was bare of every vestige of grass and contained a clutter that seemed to embrace everything namable, including a gravestone.

"What be ye gettin' ready for—an auction?" growled the Cap'n, groutily, his seaman's sense of tidiness offended. "Who do you expect will bid in a second-hand gravestone?"

"It ain't second-hand," replied the owner, reprovingly, as he eased himself out of the wagon. "Mis' Gammon, my first wife, is buried there. 'Twas by her request. She made her own layin'-out clothes, picked her bearers and music, and selected the casket. She was a capable woman."

"It's most a wonder to me that he ever took the crape off'm the door-knob," remarked Hiram, in a husky aside to the Cap'n, not intending to be overheard and somewhat crestfallen to find that he had been.

"I didn't for some time, till it got faded," explained Mr. Gammon, without display of resentment. "I had the casket-plate mounted on black velvet and framed. It's in the settin'-room. I'll show it to you before you leave."

Hiram pulled his mouth to one side and hissed under shelter of his big mustache: "Well, just what a witch would want of that feller, unless 'twas to make cracked ice of him, blame me if I know!"

Mr. Gammon began apprehensive survey of his domains.

"Let's go home," muttered the Cap'n, his one idea of retreat still with him. "What do you and I know about witches, anyway, even if there are such things? We've done our duty! We've been here. If he gets us to investigatin' it will be just like him to want us to dig that woman up."

His appeal was suddenly interrupted. Mr. Gammon, peering about his premises for fresh evidences of witchcraft accomplished during his absence, bellowed frantic request to "Come, see!" He was behind the barn, and they hastened thither.

"My Gawd, gents, they've witched the ca'f!" Their eyes followed the direction of his quivering finger.

A calf was placidly surveying them from among the branches of a "Sopsy-vine" apple-tree, munching an apple that he had been able to reach. Whatever agency had boosted him there had left him wedged into the crotch of the limbs so that he could not move, though he appeared to be comfortable.

"It jest takes all the buckram out of me—them sights do," wailed Mr. Gammon. "I can't climb up there and do it. One of you will have to." He pulled out a big jackknife, opened it with his yellow teeth, and extended it.

"Have to do what?" demanded Hiram.

"Cut off his ears and tail. That's the only way to get him out from under the charm."

But Hiram, squinting up to assure himself that the calf was comfortable, pushed Mr. Gammon back and made him sit down on a pile of bean-poles.

"Better put your hat between your knees," he suggested, noting the way Mr. Gammon's thin knees were jigging. "You might knock a sliver off the bones, rappin' them together that way."

He lighted one of his long cigars, his shrewd eyes searching Mr. Gammon all the time.

"Now," said he, tipping down a battered wheelbarrow and sitting on it, "there's nothin' like gettin' down to cases. We're here official. The first selectman of this town is here. Go ahead, Cap'n Sproul, and put your questions."

"Ask 'em yourself," snorted the Cap'n, with just a flicker of resentful malice; "you're the witch expert. I ain't."

"Well," retorted Hiram, with an alacrity that showed considerable zest for the business in hand, "I never shirked duty. First, what's her name again—the woman that's doin' it all?"

"I want you to come and see—" began Mr. Gammon, apparently having his own ideas as to a witch-hunt, but Hiram shook the big cigar at him fiercely.

"We ain't got time nor inclination for inspectin' coffin-plates, wax-flowers, bewitched iron kittles, balky horses, and old ganders. Who is this woman and where does she live, and what's the matter with her?"

"She's Arizima Orff, and that's her house over the rise of that land where you can see the chimblys." Mr. Gammon was perfunctory in that reply, but immediately his little blue eyes began to sparkle and he launched out into his troubles. "There's them that don't believe in witches. I know that! And they slur me and slander me. I know it. I don't get no sympathy. I—"

"Shut up!" commanded the chief of the inquisition.

"They say I'm crazy. But I know better. Here I am with rheumaticks! Don't you s'pose I know where I got 'em? It was by standin' out all het up where she had hitched me after she'd rid' me to one of the witch conventions. She—"

"Say, you look here!" roared the old showman; "you stay on earth. Don't you try to fly and take us with you. There's the principal trouble in gettin' at facts," he explained, whirling on the Cap'n. "Investigators don't get down to cases. Talk with a stutterer, and if you don't look sharp you'll get to stutterin' yourself. Now, if we don't look out, Gammon here will have us believin' in witches before we've investigated."

"You been sayin' right along that you did believe in 'em," grunted the first selectman.

"Northin' of the sort!" declared Hiram. "I was only showin' you that when you rose up and hollered that there never was any witches you didn't know what you were talkin' about."

While Cap'n Sproul was still blinking at him, trying to comprehend the exact status of Hiram's belief, that forceful inquisitor, who had been holding his victim in check with upraised and admonitory digit, resumed:

"Old maid or widder?"

"Widder."

"Did deceased leave her that farm, title clear, and well-fixed financially?"

"Yes," acknowledged Mr. Gammon.

"Now," Hiram leaned forward and wagged that authoritative finger directly under the other's case-knife nose, "what was it she done to you to make you get up this witch-story business about her? Here! Hold on!" he shouted, detecting further inclination on the part of Mr. Gammon to rail about his bedevilment. "You talk good Yankee common sense! Down to cases! What started this? You can't fool me, not for a minute! I've been round the world too much. I know every fake from a Patagonian cockatoo up to and including the ghost of Bill Beeswax. She done something to you. Now, what was it?"

Mr. Gammon was cowed. He fingered his dewlap and closed and unclosed his lips.

"Out with it!" insisted Hiram. "If you don't, me and the selectman will have you sued for slander."

"Up to a week ago," confessed Mr. Gammon, gazing away from the blazing eyes of Hiram into the placid orbs of the calf in the tree, "we was goin' to git married. Farms adjoined. She knowed me and I knowed her. I've been solemn since Mis' Gammon died, but I've been gittin' over it. We was goin' to jine farms and I was goin' to live over to her place, because it wouldn't be so pleasant here with Mis' Gammon—"

He hesitated, and ducked despondent head in the direction of the front yard.

"Well, seconds don't usually want to set in the front parlor window and read firsts' epitaphs for amusement," remarked Hiram, grimly. "What then?"

"Well, then all at once she wouldn't let me into the house, and she shooed me off'm her front steps like she would a yaller cat, and when I tried to find out about it that young Haskell feller that she's hired to do her chores come over here and told me that he wasn't goin' to stay there much longer, 'cause she had turned witch, and had put a cluck onto the cat when the old hen—"

"'Tend to cases! 'Tend to cases!" broke in Hiram, impatiently.

"And about that time the things began to act out round my place, and the Haskell boy told me that she was braggin' how she had me bewitched."

"And you believed that kind of infernal tomrot?" inquired the showman, wrathfully. Somewhat to the Cap'n's astonishment, Hiram seemed to be taking only a sane and normal view of the thing.

"I did, after I went over and taxed her with it, and she stood off and pointed her shotgun at me and said that yes, she was a witch, and if I didn't get away and keep away she would turn me into a caterpillar and kill me with a fly-spanker. There! When a woman says that about herself, what be ye goin' to do—tell her she's a liar, or be a gent and believe her?" Mr. Gammon was bridling a little.

Hiram looked at "Cheerful Charles" and jerked his head around and stared at the Cap'n as though hoping for some suggestion. But the selectman merely shook his head with a pregnant expression of "I told you so!"

Hiram got up and stamped around the tree to cover what was evidently momentary embarrassment. All at once he kicked at something in the grass, bent over and peered at it, looked up at the calf, then picked up the object on the ground and stuffed it deep into his trousers pocket.

"You said that chore feller's name was Haskell, hey?" he demanded, returning and standing over Mr. Gammon.

"Simmy Haskell," said the other.

"Well, now, what have you done to him?"

"Nothin'—never—no, sir—never nothin'!" insisted Mr. Gammon, with such utter conviction that Hiram forebore to question further. He whirled on his heel and started away toward the chimney that poked above the rise of land.

"Come along!" he called, gruffly, over his shoulder, and the two followed.

It was a trim little place that was revealed to them. A woman in a sunbonnet was on her knees near some plants in the cozy front yard, and a youth was wheeling apples up out of the orchard.

The youth set down his barrow and surveyed them with some curiosity as they came up to him, Hiram well ahead, looming with all his six feet two, his plug-hat flashing in the sun. Hiram did not pause to palter with the youth. He grabbed him by the back of the neck with one huge hand, and with the other tapped against the Haskell boy's nose the object he had picked up from the grass.

"Next time you put a man's calf up a tree look out that you don't drop your knife in the wrassle."

"'Tain't my knife!" gasped the accused.

"Lie to me, will ye? Lie to me—a man that's associated with liars all my life? Not your knife, when your name is scratched on the handle? And don't you know that two officers stood right over behind the stone wall and saw you do it? Because you wasn't caught in your cat-yowlin' round and your ox-chain foolishness and your other didoes, do you think you can fool a detective like me? You come along to State Prison! I was intendin' to let you off if you owned up and told all you know—but now that you've lied to me, come along to State Prison!"

There was such vengefulness and authority in the big man's visage that the Haskell boy wilted in unconditional surrender.

"He got me into the scrape. I'll tell on him. I don't want to go to State Prison," he wailed, and then confession flowed from him with the steady gurgle of water from a jug. "He come to me, and he says, says he, 'He won't ever be no kind of a boss for you. If he marries her you'll get fed on bannock and salt pork. He's sourer'n bonny-clabber and meaner'n pig-swill. Like enough he won't keep help, anyway, and will let everything go to rack and ruin, the same as he has on his own place. I'm the one to stick to,' says he. 'I've got a way planned, and all I need is your help and we'll stand together,' he says, 'and here's ten dollars in advance.' And I took it and done what he planned. I needed the money, and I done it. He says to me that we'll do things to him to make him act crazy, and we'll tell her that he's dangerous, and then you can tell him, says he, that she's turned witch, and is doin' them things to him; ''cause a man that has got his first wife buried in front of his doorstep is fool enough to believe most anything,' says he."

"Well," remarked Hiram, after a long breath, "this 'sezzer,' whoever he may be, when he got to sezzin', seems to have made up his mind that there was one grand, sweet song of love in this locality that was goin' to be sung by a steam-calliope, and wind up with boiler bustin'."

"Why in devilnation don't you ask him who 'twas that engineered it?" demanded Cap'n Sproul, his eyes blazing with curiosity.

"An official investigation," declared Hiram, with a relish he could not conceal, as he returned the Cap'n's earlier taunt upon that gentleman himself, "is not an old maids' quiltin'-bee, where they throw out the main point as soon's they get their hoods off, and then spend the rest of the afternoon talkin' it over. Things has to take their right and proper course in an official investigation. I'm the official investigator."

He turned on Mr. Gammon.

"What do you think now, old hearse-hoss? Have you heard enough to let you in on this? Or do you want to be proved out as the original old Mister Easymark, in a full, illustrated edition, bound in calf? So fur's I'm concerned, I've heard enough on that line to make me sick."

This amazing demolishment of his superstition left Mr. Gammon gasping. Only one pillar of that mental structure was standing. He grabbed at it.

"I didn't believe she was the witch till she told me so herself," he stammered. "She never lied to me. I believed what she told me with her own mouth."

The Haskell boy, still in the clutch of Hiram, evidently believed that the kind of confession that was good for the soul was full confession.

"I told her that the time you was dangerousest was when any one disputed with you about not havin' the witches. I told her that if you ever said anything she'd better join in and agree with you, and humor you, 'cause that's the only way to git along with crazy folks."

For the first time in many years color showed in the drab cheeks of the melancholy Mr. Gammon. Two vivid red spots showed that, after all, it was blood, not water, that flowed in his veins.

"Dod lather you to a fritter, you little freckle-faced, snub-nosed son of seco!" he yelped, shrilly. "I've been a mild and peaceable man all my life, but I'm a good mind to—I'm a good mind to—" He searched his meek soul for enormities of retribution, and declared: "I'm a good mind to skin you, hide, pelt, and hair. I'll cuff your ears up to a pick, any way!" But Hiram pushed him away when he advanced.

"There! That's the way to talk up, Gammon," he said, encouragingly. "You are showin' improvement. Keep on that way and you'll get to be quite a man. I was afraid you wasn't anything but a rusty marker for a graveyard lot. If you don't keep your back up some in this world, you're apt to get your front knocked in. But I can't let you lick the boy! This investigation is strictly official and according to the law, and he's turned State's evidence. It's the other critter that you want to be gettin' your muscle up for—the feller that was tryin' to get the widder and the property away from you. All the other evidence now bein' in, you may tell the court, my son, who was that 'sezzer.' You sha'n't be hurt!"

"It was Mister Batson Reeves, the second selectman," blurted the youth.

There are moments in life when language fails, when words are vain; when even a whisper would take the edge from a situation. Such a moment seemed that one when Hiram Look and Cap'n Sproul gazed at each other after the Haskell boy had uttered that name.

After a time Hiram turned, seized the boy by the scruff of his coat, and dragged him up to the front-yard fence, where the widow was gazing at them with increasing curiosity.

"Haskell boy," commanded Hiram, "tell her—tell her straight, and do it quick."

And when the confession, which went more glibly the second time, was concluded, the investigator gave the culprit a toss in the direction of the Gammon farm, and shouted after him: "Go get that calf down out of that apple-tree, and set down with him and trace out your family relationship. You'll probably find you're first cousins."

Mrs. Orff had sunk down weakly on a bed of asters, and was staring from face to face.

"Marm," said Hiram, taking off his plug hat and advancing close to the fence, "Cap'n Sproul and myself don't make it our business to pry into private affairs, or to go around this town saving decent wimmen from Batson Reeves. But we seem to have more or less of it shoved onto us as a side-line. You listen to me! Batson Reeves was the man that lied to the girl I was engaged to thirty years ago, and broke us up and kept us apart till I came back here and licked him, and saved her just in the nick of time. What do you think of a man of that stamp?"

"I didn't really like him as well—as well as—" quavered the widow, her eyes on the appealing orbs of Mr. Gammon; "but I was told I was in danger, and he wanted to be my protector."

"Protector!" sneered Hiram. "Since he's been a widderer he's been tryin' to court and marry every woman in the town of Smyrna that's got a farm and property. We know it. We can prove it. All he wants is money! You've just escaped by luck, chance, and the skin of your teeth from a cuss that northin' is too low for him to lay his hand to. What do you think of a man that, in order to make trouble and disgrace for his neighbors, will dress up in his dead wife's clothes and snoop around back doors and write anonymous letters to confidin' wimmen?"

"My Lawd!" gasped the widow.

"We caught him at it! So, as I say, you've escaped from a hyena. Now, Mr. Gammon only needs a wife like you to get him out of the dumps."

Mr. Gammon wiped tears from his cheeks and gazed down on her.

"Charles," she said, gently, "won't you come into the house for a few minits? I want to talk to you!"

But as Mr. Gammon was about to obey joyously, Hiram seized his arm.

"Just a moment," he objected. "We'll send him right in to you, marm, but we've got just a little matter of business to talk over with him."

And when they were behind the barn he took Mr. Gammon by his coat-collar with the air of a friend.

"Gammon," said he, "what are you goin' to do to him? Me and the Cap'n are interested. He'll be comin' here this evenin'. He'll be comin' to court. Now, what are you goin' to do?"

There was an expression on Mr. Gammon's face that no one had ever seen there before. His eyes were narrowed. His pointed tongue licked his lips. His thin hair bristled.

"What are you goin' to do to him?"

"Lick him!" replied Mr. Gammon. It was laconic, but it sounded like a rat-tail file on steel.

"You can do it!" said Hiram, cheerfully. "The Cap'n and I both have done it, and it's no trouble at all. I was in hopes you'd say that!"

"Lick him till his tongue hangs out!" said Mr. Gammon, with bitterer venom.

"That will be a good place to lay for him; right down there by the alders," suggested the Cap'n, pointing his finger.

"Yes, sir, lick him till his own brother won't know him." And Mr. Gammon clicked together his bony fists, as hard as flints.

"And that's another point!" said Hiram, hastily. "You've seen to-day that I'm a pretty shrewd chap to guess. I've been round the world enough to put two and two together. Makin' man my study is how I've got my property. Now, Gammon, you've got that writin' by Squire Alcander Reeves. When you said 'brother' it reminded me of what I've been ponderin'. Bat Reeves has been making the Widder Orff matter a still hunt. His brother wasn't on. When you went to the squire to complain, squire saw a chance to get the Cap'n into a law scrape—slander, trespass, malicious mischief—something! Them lawyers are ready for anything!"

"Reg'lar sharks!" snapped the selectman.

"Now," continued Hiram, "after you've got Bat Reeves licked to an extent that will satisfy inquirin' friends and all parties interested, you hand that writin' to him! It will show him that his blasted fool of a lawyer brother, by tryin' to feather his own nest, has lost him the widder and her property, got him his lickin', and put him into a hole gen'rally. Tell him that if it hadn't been for that paper drivin' us out here northin' would have been known."

Hiram put up his nose and drew in a long breath of prophetic satisfaction.

"And if I'm any judge of what 'll be the state of Bat Reeves's feelin's in general when he gets back to the village, the Reeves family will finish up by lickin' each other—and when they make a lawsuit out of that it will be worth while wastin' a few hours in court to listen to. How do you figger it, Cap'n?"

"It's a stem-windin', self-actin' proposition that's wound up, and is now tickin' smooth and reg'lar," said the Cap'n, with deep conviction. "They'll both get it!"

And they did.

Cap'n Aaron Sproul and Hiram Look shook hands on the news before nine o'clock the next morning.

Mr. Loammi Crowther plodded up the road. Mr. Eleazar Bodge stumped down the road.

They arrived at the gate of Cap'n Aaron Sproul, first selectman of Smyrna, simultaneously.

Bathed in the benignancy of bland Indian summer, Cap'n Sproul and his friend Hiram Look surveyed these arrivals from the porch of the Sproul house.

At the gate, with some apprehensiveness, Mr. Bodge gave Mr. Crowther precedence. As usual when returning from the deep woods, Mr. Crowther was bringing a trophy. This time it was a three-legged lynx, which sullenly squatted on its haunches and allowed itself to be dragged through the dust by a rope tied into its collar.

"You needn't be the least mite afeard of that bobcat," protested Mr. Crowther, cheerily; "he's a perfick pet, and wouldn't hurt the infant in its cradle."

The cat rolled back its lips and snarled. Mr. Bodge retreated as nimbly as a man with a peg-leg could be expected to move.

"I got him out of a trap and cured his leg, and he's turrible grateful," continued Mr. Crowther.

But Mr. Bodge trembled even to his mat of red beard as he backed away.

"Him and me has got so's we're good friends, and I call him Robert—Bob for short," explained the captor, wistfully.

"You call him off—that's what you call him," shouted Mr. Bodge. "I hain't had one leg chawed off by a mowin'-machine to let a cust hyeny chaw off the other. Git out of that gateway. I've got business here with these gents."

"So've I," returned Mr. Crowther, meekly; and he went in, dragging his friend.

"I done your arrunt," he announced to the Cap'n. "I cruised them timberlands from Dan to Beersheby, and I'm ready to state facts and figgers."

"Go ahead and state," commanded the Cap'n.