The postscript stated that he had kept the team as a wedding present, and they were going to do the gift-sale graft at fairs from the carriage—having now the necessary capital. With deep regard for him and all inquiring friends, they were, etc.
Hiram’s eye at last found the knot-hole in the platform, and he sat with his elbows on his knees and regarded it for a long time. At first his face was ridged and knotted with fury that his moving lips could not express. Then there came grief in the puckers around his mouth—the grief of a man who felt that the whole world was against him.
He, sitting there—he who had not dared to meet the grinning voters of Palermo since that town meeting, the man who now held this riddled bankbook and that unspeakable letter crumpled in his grasp was the same man who had boasted that no one had ever “done” him!
He pulled off his tall hat in order to wipe his damp forehead.
He regarded its fuzzy nap with growing malevolence. Somehow, it seemed to suggest the braggart, the showman, grafting women, Simon Peaks and the atmosphere of tricksters. He set it upon the platform, stamped it into shapelessness, and then kicked it with all his might. It landed in the top of the lilac bush.
“Crack ’em down, gents!” squalled the parrot excitedly. He had been watching his master with solicitude for many hours, and this sudden activity reassured him.
Hiram glanced up at Absalom with a vindictiveness that should have warned the bird, and then sat down in his chair. He turned over Simon’s letter, flattened it on his bankbook, and began to write on the surface with a stubby lead pencil that he had licked carefully:
“For Sale—One band waggon, one swan chariot, three lion cages, one round-top——”
He was interrupted.
Squire Phin came up the little path from the road and took a seat on the porch.
Hiram bent his brows in a scowl and looked at him, pencil poised above the paper.
“I’ll make my business brief, brother,” said the lawyer, with a wistful humility that pricked Hiram a bit, despite his rancour. “I realise how you feel toward me, and I have not come upon your porch without good reason. You may not have noticed that I have been away for a day or two, for you haven’t been very much interested in my movements for some time. But I have been absent. I’ve been at the shire on some law business.
“One of my friends who is a trustee in the Union Savings Bank mentioned to me that one Simon Peak, accompanied by a strange woman, had drawn ten thousand dollars on your order, after having been identified by one of the traders near by. I was inter-: ested enough to want to see that order, and——”
“Say, ain’t I got any bus’ness of any kind that I can ’tend to myself without some one pokin’ in their nose?” demanded Hiram with fury.
“I plead guilty to being a meddler, Hiram,” returned the Squire calmly. “But I’ve taken the chances. I figured you could not dislike me any more for doing this than you did before. And whatever else we are, you are my brother, and Simon Peak is a man of whom I have always been distrustful. I saw that the amount in the order had been filled in by some one else than yourself. I didn’t know then what deal you could have with Peak. I don’t know now, for I didn’t believe a word of the yarn he told me—-but the amount of the matter is, Hiram, I took measures to have Peak and his companion followed and apprehended. I interviewed them privately; I made them disgorge, and here is your money—all except a couple of hundred dollars. I gave them that much and the team so that they could get out of the State and not annoy you any more. You’ll not see them again. I told them that I’d put the two of them into State prison as blackmailers if they showed up here.”
He laid a thick wallet upon his brother’s lap.
“If I have meddled in your affairs, brother, forgive me. But I couldn’t stand by and see two thieves run away with what you have worked so hard to earn.”
Hiram fumbled at the package a moment and then banged it down on the platform, his face working with emotion whose nature was not easily to be determined.
“Just one moment, Hiram, before you reproach me,” said the Squire hastily. “Wait! Not a word’ from you now! I’m going to take advantage of this opportunity and be honest with you. You were right that day in town meeting, brother. If in everything in this world we must hew to the line of justice, you were right that day. But I tell you, Hiram, you and I both have seen that it isn’t always safe to hew to the line. I stood there fighting for the financial peace and confidence of our little town, but most of all for the woman I love, and when you got in the way I struck you. That’s the truth of it, brother. And I’m afraid I’d do it again, Hiram, for you can’t expect the perfect man to come out of the Look family. The only thing I can promise you, brother, is to be honest with you, and I am that—square with you through thick and thin, and I will always be that. But you have got to keep your hands off my treasures—-and you know what they are!”
He held out his open palm and smiled.
“Can’t you take my hand on that, brother Hiram?”
“I’ve got just a little favour to ask of you, Phin,” said Hiram, his hands still at his side. “I want you to leave me here on this porch ten minutes so that I can get fit to grip your hand. I can do a good deal of helpful thinkin’ in ten minutes, Phin. And when I come ’round the corner of that house, boy, it will be the differentest man you ever see. And I want you to put out your hand and shake just as if I was home for the first time after all those years—and I guess that’s the fact of the case, brother.”
When the Squire, with head bowed and with a smile on his lips, reached the corner of the house Hiram hailed him. There was such a queer note in his brother’s voice that the lawyer whirled in some astonishment.
Hiram stood, the points of his long moustache tightly gripped in one hand under his chin, as though he were trying to pull down the corners of his lips that were spreading into a broader and rather foolish smile.
“I just wanted to warn you, Phin,” he chuckled, “that I’ve got a little something in the way of—of—-well, as you said, ‘treasures’ to talk about.”
“Treasures!” repeated the lawyer, wonderingly.
“Well, that’s what she is!” blurted Hiram. “And you don’t ever have to apologise for what you did to me. I know how it is. I’ve got a critter to walk over in the same way.” And with this enigmatic statement he waved a hand at his brother and went back to his chair.
He began to frown again as he wrote.
“It’s goin’ to be a clean sale,” he muttered. “I don’t never in all my life want to see a circus, hear of a circus, talk with a circus man——”
The parrot hooked his beak around a wire and rattled away jovially:
“Crack ’em down, gents!” he shrieked.
Hiram shot an angry glance and an oath at the cage.
“No, sir, never! They may molasses ye over at first, but it’s only to make ye easier to swaller. Own folks don’t do that. You know just where to find ’em, there’s that much about ’em. It’s goin’ to be a clean sale. Think of it—me a man that has been through it all from A to Z being held up by——”
“Twenty can play it as well as one!” remarked the parrot.
It was a hideous scowl that Hiram flashed up.
“Not only trimmin’ me, but makin’ me run the risk of goin’ to court and havin’ it trailed out from Clew to Erie!”
“It’s the old army game, gents!” the parrot squalled. His tone was nerve-racking.
Hiram rose, yanked the bottom out of the cage, caught the squawking bird after considerable damage to a forefinger, wrung his neck, walked down to the road, and flung him far over the opposite stone wall. When he came back he caught the battered hat from the top of the lilac bush and sent it after the deceased Absalom.
Then, sucking his bleeding finger at intervals, he went on writing his advertisement.
CHAPTER XXII—HOW SYLVENA WILLARD “TRIED IT ON THE DOG,”
WITH HAPPY RESULTS
Dan’l and Dunk and the yaller dog
Were owners and crew of the Pollywog,
A hand-line smack that cuffed the seas, ’tween ’Tinicus
Head and Point Quahaug.
Dunk owned half and Dan owned half, and the yaller
dog was also “joint”;
They fished and ate
And swapped their bait,
And allus agreed on every point.
—“Ballads of the Banks.”
It did not surprise the people of Palermo when the word passed that Judge Collamore Willard had decided to retire from business.
His callers had noticed his failing strength through the winter months, his unsteady gait, the tremulous wavering of his hands when he scrabbled among the papers on his table. They ascribed all this to the infirmities of age. Gossip that he had lost money, or that there was some basis for the sensational charges flung at him by Hiram Look, fell upon barren soil of belief in Palermo. Local confidence in the Willard fortunes and Willard integrity was too strong to be weakened thus.
Old men, spinsters and widows came straggling in, after persistent drumming at them by the Squire, to receive the sums due them. The process of settlements covered many days, and the lawyer had need of all his patience.
For old folks, even when the money was in their hands, stood by the Judge’s table and begged him to take it back.
“Banks is failin’ and thieves is stealin’,” was their lament. “There ain’t nobody ever done so well by us as you, Judge. It won’t bother you none to take care of just this little. We won’t say nothin’ about your havin’ it.”
At times like these the Judge turned a wistful gaze on the lawyer, and with something of appeal in his eyes. But he met; always the shake of the head and the tightening of the lips.
“You can’t afford to take a single chance, Judge,” the Squire had told him at the beginning of the business. “You must not owe one man a dollar. Your books and your papers will be your own, then. And they must be burned. Evidence of this sort must not haunt your last days or your family after you are gone. Forgive me for having made the conditions that I have, but it is the only way out for all of us.”
Those in town who were at first surprised that Squire Look had been accepted as the Judge’s man of business found ready explanation in the public quarrel of the Look brothers, and the fact that the Squire was better qualified than any one else in Palermo to manage the affairs of an old man whose grip on them had slipped.
Outsiders saw only the relations of client and lawyer.
Even such an insider as the Squire himself had been seeing not much else during the weeks that had elapsed since the town meeting.
For on the first day of the many on which he came to Judge Willard’s office he had met Sylvena, and she had such a new, strange, even disquieting light in her eyes that he had blurted something that gave her final and complete proof that he understood his musty law books better than he did a woman’s heart.
“Sylvie,” he said, “I have been ashamed of myself ever since. I had no right to take advantage just because you asked a favour of me that a friend ought to be ready and willing to grant. I’m an old brute, and I know it. You asked me to help your father, and I reached out across your heart and your needs and grabbed as a robber grabs at a pocketbook. I’m ashamed of it. I ought to know that that isn’t the way to win a woman, but I reckon I don’t know much of anything outside of my law. No, don’t try to forgive me! I’ve got the old grip on myself again. You needn’t worry!”
And she, with her heart stirring ever since that day when for the first time a true man’s earnest, eager, imperious love had claimed her—she who had come to him again yearning for a confirmation even, sweeter, bit her lips when he whirled and left her, gazed after him with eyes that filled, and then—well, then she stamped her foot and muttered something that it would have astonished the Squire to hear.
He did not see her on every visit. But sometimes she was on the porch, and when the weather grew warmer she was often busy with her shrubs on the lawn.
The constant reserve on his part appeared to be contriteness for having once presumed in a trying moment.
Her reserve was something that developed into an air that closely resembled irritability, and he couldn’t understand it in the least. It made him draw a little more closely into his shell. He thought that perhaps memory of his fault stirred hotly within her when she saw him—perhaps as the memory of that kiss burned even now on his lips.
Therefore matters of the Squire’s heart were in fully as bad a way as matters of the Judge’s pocket.
With the true status of her father’s position, financially and morally, Sylvena was mercifully unacquainted, for when she had fearfully questioned him he had as fearfully paltered and denied.
The old dog Eli was the only one who was really cheered by the visits of Phineas Look to the Willard place.
At first he had sat on the door-step of the office, meditatively gazing out across the Cove.
Then one day he remarked a very pretty lady who was surveying him from the window of the house, and was apparently motioning to him. But as Eli had never found that pretty ladies were at any time much interested in fuzzy old dogs, he reckoned he must be mistaken about the beckoning. However, he gently wagged his tail in order to be on the safe side of agreeability. Then he looked away with some embarrassment.
“Well, if that isn’t like master, like dog, may I be blessed,” stated the lady in the window to herself with much decision.
She came to the door, opened it a bit, and called through the crack with impatient tone:
“Here, you old fool, come in here and get a bite to eat. I’d like to speak out in just that same way to some one else,” she added.
Eli promptly detected something like hostility in the voice and stopped wagging his tail. He hunched down his head and dropped his ears.
The lady surveyed him with disfavour.
“I suppose if I get down on my knees and put out both hands and smile and say, ‘Doggie, doggie, dear, good doggie, come here!’ why, then doggie will condescend to come. But I won’t do it!”
She closed the door with an emphatic slam that made Eli jump, and went back to the window.
But something in the mien of the old dog, who sat wistfully eyeing the closed door, touched her heart.
“I’m blaming him for something he don’t know—something he don’t understand,” she murmured at last, pity in her eyes. She went to the door and opened it wide. Then she stooped forward and wriggled her fingers coaxingly as she said:
“You nice old fellow, come here.”
He hesitated.
She pursed her lips and invited him with crisp little noises that sounded like kisses. She must have realised the suggestiveness of these sounds, for she suddenly blushed furiously and began to call to the dog softly and winningly.
He came, his shaggy ears cocked up with expectancy, his tail expressing his most genial appreciation of the invitation.
That was Eli’s first visit to the Willard kitchen in company with the pretty lady.
If he’d had a tongue that could speak, instead of merely loll in thankful gusto after his repasts in that kitchen, he could have told Squire Phin of a pretty lady with red cheeks and a touch of gray at her temples who often snuggled her face close to his tousled ears and spoke in a tone sometimes that amazed him mightily, and who one day rose in haste, drove some tears from her eyes, and said with the determination of a woman who has searched and found:
“You’d better come along, too, Eli, for it’s business that concerns that master of yours!”
And she started from the kitchen straight for her father’s office, the old dog waddling at her heels.
Five minutes before that Squire Phin had pushed his elbows into the papers on the big table, leaned forward with clasped fingers, and said:
“We’ve got now, Judge, where we can see the way clear. I have turned into money for you everything except this house and contents. The mortgage on it has been paid.”
The Judge began a stammering inquiry, but the lawyer checked him.
“I’ve got to tell you the truth about it, Judge. I advanced the money myself to do it. About three thousand dollars are due you from men who will pay some time but can’t now without being hard put to it to raise the money. I’ll take those accounts and advance the cash. We have paid every cent you owe and squared with every depositor.”
The lawyer stared at the old man in silence for a time.
“I’ll be frank and say that in order to bring about this settlement I have put in every cent of money I have saved, all that Hiram paid me, and have used certain fees I have received lately from several large cases. But I am the only creditor you have. I want you to sign these notes, running to me, for that will be business. But I want to say to you, Judge, that I shall not press for payment, nor shall I say one word to any living soul that you owe me a cent or are not solvent. There is a residue banked and subject to your order sufficient for you to continue your usual way of living. Wait a moment until I have finished! I have asked you to lie to Sylvena, to contradict some truths that I blurted to her in my folly. It was a big thing to ask of a father, but you owe me for lying publicly on your behalf. I fear that both of us are sad liars! If you by word or look or action ever let your daughter know that you have lost your fortune I will withdraw my promise to you and put you to the wall. And that threat is the truth, so help me God!”
The old Judge licked his trembling lips and took the notes that the Squire handed him for signature.
“You needn’t feel under any obligation to me, Judge Willard,” went on the lawyer. “I’ll square myself somehow, sometime. We’ll consider it straight business.”
“But I know it isn’t straight business,” replied the Judge brokenly. “I know that you have done for me what no other man of my whole acquaintance would have done. I may guess at part of your reason for it, Phineas. But that reason doesn’t absolve me from the obligation I am under to you. I’m too broken now to plan or promise. I am an old man—too old to start anew. But I don’t believe that God will take me out of this world until I have in some way shown you that I appreciate all you have done for me and can prove to you that I am sorry for the past. I mean that with all the sincerity of an old man that will be judged Above for his deeds on earth sooner than you, Phineas!”
The eyes of both men were moist, and in a moment of impulsiveness the Squire reached across the table and took the Judge’s hand. But when a visitor’s touch rattled the outside latch of the door a flash of the old Look family feeling caused him to suddenly twitch away. He felt, with a certain shame, that he did not want any one to catch him shaking the hand of Collamore Willard.
It was the Judge’s daughter.
She held the door open until Eli had entered, too, with the apologetic demeanour of one who knew certain things and was therefore apprehensive.
“Father,” she said, her eyes brilliant, her cheeks flushed, but glorious in all her aspect, with the poise of a woman who has fully resolved and therefore dares, “will I be interrupting you and Phineas too much if I take a moment of your time?”
“I—I think our business is about finished,” said the Judge, falteringly. He put his hand over the notes that he had just signed.
“I have come here,” she went on, “because it is a matter that both of you should listen to at the same time. It is simply this, father: Phineas Look has spoken his love for me and has shown his love for me. As we all know that he is a man whose word is sacred, I take it for granted that he is still of the same mind. There have been troubles between our families in which I have had no share, but which at your request I respected in some measure. I have allowed you to make other promises for me without my sanction, for you are my father and it has been the custom in the Willard family to honour parents and gainsay them in little.
“I have now decided that it is cowardice instead of loyalty that has swayed me—for if I were truly loyal to your wishes I would not be loving with all my heart and soul the man you have forbidden me to love. The Willards have not been cowards. I know I am disobeying you, father. But my mind is made up. It will be no use for you to make it harder for us both by cruel words. That portion of property that was to have been mine I surrender willingly to Kleber. My husband does not want my fortune.”
The face of the old man contracted with a sudden grimace of shame and pain. Squire Phin, who had been staring at her, his palms outspread on the table to prop himself, pushed some papers over the notes spread before the Judge and trembled in every muscle.
She flashed a sudden look that was half-indignation into his burning eyes.
“Have I not been unwomanly enough without your making me coax you and wheedle you to me, as I have had to woo your old dog?” she demanded, stamping her foot. And then seeing that he swayed dizzily at the table, confounded by the situation, she came close, reached across over the scattered papers and patted his broad hand.
“Now what have you got to say to me, Phineas?” she whispered. “I know you can talk, for I have listened to you with my heart in my mouth.”
But even while the Judge was scrambling up from his chair with stammering words on his lips, even as the Squire seized the white hand that fluttered above his own, another visitor entered the office.
This visitor—and a very obstreperous visitor it was—threw his hat upon the table, squared his elbows and glared at the three in turn.
It was Captain Kleber Willard of the Lycurgus Webb. His dark seaman’s face was streaked with purple blotches, his eyes were bloodshot and sullen, and it was apparent that passion and liquor had combined to give Captain Willard an unamiable temper. His gaze first singled the Squire with an especially furious squint of hatred, but his father spoke to him and he whirled on the Judge.
“Why didn’t you do as you agreed?” he shouted. “Me to Buenos Ayres and back, off earnin’ a dollar, where I couldn’t protect myself, and you promisin’ to keep that deal covered! Why didn’t you do it, I say?”
The old man turned a pitiful glance on his daughter and attempted to quiet the angry man with words spoken close to his ear, but the Captain twisted away from him.
“It’s time the whole of this family knows what the others are about,” he raged. “I ain’t doin’ anything that I’m ashamed of. The rest of ye see to it that you ain’t, either. I tell ye I won’t keep still. Sylvene Willard is old enough to know bus’ness, or she can leave the room. If some that I can see here had any instincts of a gentleman they’d get out, too, when a family is talkin’ its bus’ness. I tell you, father, you’ve got to explain to me how you let me get dropped for ten thousand. You didn’t send Bradish the margins as you agreed. You dropped him, too. It’s no use for you to hush-a-bye me. I know you did it.
“The Webb wasn’t a half a day in New York when Bradish came down to show me the documents. It was there in black and white. You backed out and dumped us. You dumped Bradish. He hasn’t got the price of a meal. I tell you I won’t shut up! If you had gone in on that last deal that Bradish told you about we’d have cleaned up a fortune. We depended on you, the both of us, to furnish the money. You didn’t do it. You sent King up there and then backed out on him. There isn’t any other explanation for it—you backed out on him. It only needed money and you didn’t send it.”
He stamped around the room, picked up his hat, threw it down again and went on with his bitter complaints.
Squire Phin stood leaning against the edge of the table, very grave, and kept his silence. But there were two deep wrinkles between his eyes, and the lids narrowed slowly. On his own account the blatant, brutal bursting in of this man at the greatest, the sweetest, holiest moment of his life had shocked and angered him. The words that he wanted to speak to her were choking in his throat. On their account the presence of the man, his selfish stormings and threats and complaints, exasperated him in his pity for the trembling old man, and the sister, who was at her brother’s side as he tramped about the room, pleading with him to be silent and to explain to her.
At last Captain Willard plumped himself down in the chair that his father had vacated and thumped his hard fist on the table.
“The sum total is, father, you’ve got to settle with me,” he shouted. “You promised to protect me and you didn’t. It’s up to you to make good.”
He had from time to time been casting angry glances at the lawyer.
“If you’ve got any bus’ness here, Mr. Lawyer Look,” he said insolently, “I wish you’d ’tend to it and get out. My father and I don’t want audiences when we talk over family matters, and we don’t usually have audiences, either.”
Squire Phin understood the dumb appeal in the eyes of the Judge. This unruly son had hold of one end of his secret and was tugging away vigorously. The father realised that the son had the right to demand certain explanations. But revelations made to this explosive person could not be kept away from the daughter. And over the Judge’s head swung the threat of the grim lawyer, sealed with its oath.
With instant pity for the old man’s agony of apprehension, the Squire acted. He stepped into the affairs of the Willard family with the happy consciousness that now he had a right to be there.
“Captain Kleber,” he said, “I have been retained by your father as his legal adviser. I have been that for some time. You may discuss family affairs with him at your leisure and in whatever privacy you wish. On account of the state of Judge Willard’s health he has left all his business affairs to me. The matter that you have mentioned is one of business. You will please come to my office with me, now.”
He dwelt on the last word significantly. He took his hat from the table and went and stood by the door.
When the lawyer had begun to speak the Captain hooked himself forward in his chair, his fingers clutching air, his face working with rage.
“It was the only thing that King Bradish told me that I didn’t believe,” he shouted. “One of the Look family hired as a lawyer by my father? I swore it wasn’t so! If it is so, damme if I don’t make you all sick here in this place. If it is so——”
“It certainly is so, Captain,” broke in the Squire, stepping back into the room. “You will kindly refrain from making any more comments on the matter. Come to my office with me.”
“Comments!” shouted the seaman. “Comments! I ain’t got language enough to make comments! Old Dan’l Webster in his palmiest days couldn’t talk fast enough to express it. I’ll bet a thousand to one I know what the trouble is with you, father. I’ll bet it’s just as King said it was. That skin lawyer has got next to you and robbed you—he and his brother, the two of ’em! There’s a good reason for your not havin’ money to protect your own son if the Look family has got their claws in here. Do you hear me, Sylvene? A thousand to one the dogs have ruined this family! Why didn’t you send the old man to the lunatic asylum before you let him ram us underground this way?”
In his fury he had been clutching up the papers on the table and throwing them about. Now he suddenly bent forward with goggling eyes, his hands on the arms of the chair, and stared long at some slips of paper that he had uncovered.
He picked them up one after the other, his hands trembling so violently that the sheets crackled.
“Four notes runnin’ to Phineas Look and signed by Collamore Willard!” he yelled. “Four notes and each for five thousand dollars. Four notes! Look at ’em!”
He staggered up and thrust them under the astonished gaze of Sylvena, but with one stride the Squire was there and ripped them from his grasp.
“He has robbed us, Sylvene! He’s robbed us,” the Captain went on, mouthing like a madman. “He’s got all our money and put us in debt to him beside. The thief! The land pirate!”
He was making for the lawyer with his fists upraised, but Squire Phin struck them down and forced the furious man back into his chair. He held him there, glowering down on him with a menace that would have quelled a wild beast.
“Go ahead, Phin Look,” whimpered the Captain; “put on another scar to match the one your brother made!”
“I propose you shall listen to reason, Kleber,” Squire Phin fairly hissed, “even if I have to hold you by the throat while I give you the truth. I tell you again to come to my office, and if I fail to satisfy you, then the law is open to you.”
The seaman sank back in his chair limply and the lawyer left him. But as he turned to Sylvena with a look of infinite pity on his face, Captain Willard leaped up.
“Don’t you see now that he has done father and us out of every dollar, Sylvene?” he wailed. “Don’t you believe me when I say——”
But she came forward hastily and put both her hands into the Squire’s, looked up at him trustfully and said:
“I believe in my—my—husband, that is to be, and that is the first and the surest duty of a good wife!” The Squire put his arm about her, bent down and kissed her, a happy sob in his throat choking back the words he wanted to say.
The son stared at them a moment, his jaw dropping, whirled on his father with a curse, and then clacking his fists together in impotent rage, rushed out of the office with a bang of the door that made the little building shiver.
With his one free hand the Squire put the crumpled notes to his teeth and began quietly to tear at them.
He caught her looking at him with wistful inquiry in which there was absolute trust.
“I don’t know my Bible as well as I do the revised statutes, Sylvie,” he said, smiling at her, “but I believe there is a passage somewhere that states that a good wife is better than much fine gold, yea, more precious than rubies and all beautiful gems. Now with the thorough understanding that the Bible is right, let us sit down and have a little family conference about some things that a wife should know.” He brushed from her hair and shoulders the bits of torn paper, drew her on his knee and began to talk. The old Judge sat opposite, gazing mistily out of the window in the direction his son had taken.
For the first and the last time in his life Squire Phin did not tell the whole truth to the woman he loved.
But the sad, though unclouded resignation in the eyes of the woman, and the dumb gratitude on the face of the old man opposite when he had finished, made his lie a holy one.
CHAPTER XXIII—HIRAM LOOK’S TWO LIVELY BUSINESS ENGAGEMENTS
WITH CAPTAIN NYMPHUS BODFISH OF THE “EFFORT”
Old Zibe Haines walked out one day,
And a barbed wire fence it stopped his way.
Never climbed over, never crawled through,
But he bit that wire right plumb in two.
—Ballads of “Gumption.”
Hiram Look was approaching Palermo village and letting his horse walk up the long Witch-Run hill. He was in the middle of the seat of a brand-new top carriage. His elbows were on his knees and he was gazing at the reflection of himself in the bright dasher of the carriage. Occasionally he broke out into mellow chucklings.
“I’d have given ten dollars if Phin and all close pers’nal friends had been there with me to see it,” he soliloquised. “Me behind the wistery on the porch of the widder’s, a-takin’ it all in, and he not knowin’ I was there! Phew! Lemme git out a few more of them laughs I’ve had to swaller!”
He leaned back and haw-hawed boisterously, to the renewed astonishment of the horse, who stopped and bent his head around to gaze at his master.
“G’long!” shouted the showman. “I’ve told you all about it three times already on the way down. I had to tell some one.”
When the horse plodded on he set his elbows on his knees again and went on with his delighted monologue. He was rolling it again over his tongue with smacks of relish.
“Yess’r, I had him dead to rights! Had the very letters he’s been writin’ to that other string to his bow. And then to have him whine to the widder that he’d writ’ ’em ’cause he felt sometimes that she was gittin’ ready to throw him over and he didn’t want to git left altogether! Why, the dum fool! To tumble down like that at the first puff she give him! Me? Why, I’d ’a’ lied till there was six inches of glare ice in Tophet! I’d ’a’ said I didn’t know how to write! I’d ’a’ said that I’d been sassin’ Jim the Penman’s grandmother and he was gittin’ back at me. But he jest caved. I allus knowed he was a fool.
“And me a-settin’ there with my thumb in my vest armhole, takin’ it all in and fattin’ on the ribs! Why, I’ve heard men git down and beg, I’ve seen dogs set up on end and whine for a bone, I’ve seen a cat coax for milk-strainin’s, but never nothin’ like the way that man got down and rolled over and jumped through and played dead for that widder.
“Cap Nymp’ Bodfish, you kicked me once, and ’twas in the face and eyes of the public, and you was due to git a lot of trouble. I might have kicked you back; I might have gone on and broke a few of your arms and legs and et cet’ry. But it wouldn’t have been a scientific job like this. No, s’r, it wouldn’t have been real soul-satisfyin’. I never got no great consolation out of lickin’ a man.”
Hiram sighed at his recollections in that line. But his face cleared immediately.
“Him with his tongue out and his mouth all made up for that twenty thousand and the widder! Him as had made his brags about her, and now has got to face the grinnin’s and the sneerin’s! It will be lin-g’rin’ agony, that’s what it will.
“Lordy mighty, will I ever forgit the face he made up when he see me behind that wistery! O-h-h-h, I shall wake up in the night and laugh till I set the roosters to crowin’. Him a-drivin’ out of the yard with the widder givin’ him a few final lambastes with her tongue and me a-stickin’ my head out through the wistery. He a-tumin’ ’round to git a last look at her and seein’ me and realisin’ then—yass’r, realisin’! And his wheel ketched on a post and he fell down into the bottom of the waggon and began to push against the post like he was tryin’ to shove off a dory—clean forgittin’ he was in a team! Oh, what a state that man’s mind must have been in!”
Hiram rolled to and fro on the carriage seat in an ecstasy of mirth.
“Never’ll forgit what she said to him then.
“‘Take your reins and back up,’ says she. ‘I don’t want people ’round here to think you’re drunk as well as a complete fool, you old hump-backed, tarfingered garsoline tank! A pretty farmer you’d make—and don’t know a waggon from a dory! Git out of my yard and don’t never let me set eyes on you ag’in. I’ve got a man as is a man,’ and she pointed to me, and I swow I couldn’t help it! I set my thumb to my nose and give him the real, old-fashioned waggle. Ow, haw, haw! Ow, haw, haw!”
“And then she come right to me and give me a pat on the back and says: ‘It didn’t need any of them writin’s to make me give him his come-uppance, Mr. Look. I never give a snap of my finger for him, anyway, since I met you. Ow, hee-hee!”
“You seem to be feelin’ ’bout as gay as they make ‘em,” called a voice from the roadside.
Hiram started up and wiped the tears of merriment from his eyes.
Two men were standing by the highway fence, men whose solemn faces were streaked by perspiration. One of them carried a small rifle. The other was “Sawed-Off” Purday, the Palermo deputy-sheriff. He was armed with a club.
“Guess you must have heard the news about your friend,” said Purday, with accent on the last word. “Nothin’ else would make you any more tickleder. P’raps you’ve seen him along the ro’d. If you have we’ll be much obleeged for a clue.”
“Seen who?” demanded Hiram, thinking at first that the men referred to Captain Nymphus Bodfish. He eyed their weapons and felt a qualm of fear, for he didn’t know what the exasperated skipper might have prepared for him.
“Klebe Willard.”
“Klebe Willard!” There was relief as well as astonishment in Hiram’s tone.
“Well, there’s been hell to pave and no pitch hot down in the village,” said Doughty, nothing loath to impart sensational news. “There’s four possys out after Cap Willard and this is one of ’em. He’s took to the woods somewheres and there ain’t no knowin’ where. But I reckon I’ll catch him if I only get onto one clue,” he added, confidently. “No one ever got away from me yet. Howsomever, it’s leg-weary work, this cuttin’ acrost pastures and plowed land. You say you ain’t seen hide nor hair of him?”
“I ain’t said nothin’ about it,” retorted Hiram. “But I ain’t seen him, if that’s what you’re after. Why in Tophet don’t you tell a man what the critter has done instead of standin’ there and chawin’ ter-backer with that infernal eight-day motion?”
“It ain’t altogether clear jest what it was all about,” related Doughty, calmly. “All that’s known is that Klebe come whoopin’ into the village from Square Harbour to-day and tore into his father’s office and then come out and hot-footed home as though Old Nick was after him. In an hour or so the old Judge went down to Klebe’s house, and it seems from what the neighbours say that Klebe had been tea-in’ up in the meantime and jawin Myry, and a little while after the Judge come in he got to goin’ it worse about somethin’ or other. There ain’t much head nor tail to stories, but as near as I can find out he went to lick the old man, bein’ crazy drunk, I reckon, and Myry stepped in between, and he floored the two of ’em and kicked over one of the young ones and took to the woods howlin’ like a looservee. It’s bad bus’ness.”
Purday spat far and sighed dolefully.
“Your brother and Sylvene has sort of took charge there to Klebe’s house,” the deputy went on. “The old Judge ‘come to’ ’fore I left the village. But the doc says Myry is in a turrible bad way with the tunk she got. It won’t be none surprisin’ if murder comes out of it. It’s a glister for the Willard fam’ly, that’s what it is!”
He shifted his club to the other hand and started over the fence.
“Come along, Bragg,” he commanded. “It’s more’n li’ble that he kept to the Bunganuck ridge.”
Hiram had no desire to ask further questions. He lashed his hors’e and rattled away toward the village at his best speed.
It had been one of those unseasonably hot May days, humid and sweltering, with thunder-heads boiling above the horizon and a menace in the steaming quietness of nature.
When Hiram turned in at the yard of the Look place the low sun was dipping behind an ominously purple curtain in the west, and there was a jarring growl of thunder behind the hills.
His brother was not at home.
“He may need old Hime for somethin’ or other,” he muttered as “Figger-Four” Avery bobbed into the barn leading the horse. “It ain’t especially the place for me to go buttin’ in, under the circumstances, but I’m a right-hand man for Phin when he needs help, and he knows it now.”
He hurried away down the street, casting an occasional glance over his shoulder at the purple-black curtain of cloud. “It looks as though it was goin’ to be a ripper,” he commented.
In the yard of the Kleber Willard place little groups of villagers were talking in hushed tones.
“How be they now inside there, Uncle Buck?” inquired Hiram, solicitously.
“Them that’s still inside is in a mighty bad way,” replied the old man, grimly. He added yet more grimly, “And them that’s outside is most likely wuss off than that.”
“Them that’s outside!” repeated Hiram, smartly.
“That’s what I said. After the Judge come round into his senses they thought it was all right to leave him on the sofy till they got ready to take him home, and in the gen’ral confusion here he’s got away. Took both of Klebe’s young ones with him, the little boy and the little girl, and Lord only knows where he’s got to. I tell ye ’twa’n’t safe to leave him alone! An old man with the bang he got ’side of the head ain’t gittin’ back into his right senses all in a minit.”
“What are you standin’ around here for, all of ye?” indignantly demanded Hiram, raising his voice. “Why ain’t you out tryin’ to find the lost?”
“Why ain’t you?” retorted Uncle Lysimachus. “There’s fifty gone after ’em already and the ro’d is still open. They didn’t take it with ’em.”
The Squire had heard his brother’s voice in the yard and he came to the door, his face haggard and grief-stricken.
“It’s an awful thing, brother,” he murmured when Hiram hastened to him. “Myra is still insensible and the doctor fears a fracture of the skull. But my worst fear now is for Judge Willard and the children.”
He cast a troubled look at the sky.
“Doesn’t anyone get a word from them?” he asked wistfully.
“You hold the fort here, Phin,” returned Hiram with bluff assurance. “I’ll find ’em if I have to rake from here to Smyrna with a fine-toothed comb. I’m gittin’ to be the greatest finder you ever see, Phin. I found the Mayo girl, I found myself at last, I found a woman to-day who’ll have me, and now I’ll find the ones you want or die tryin’. Don’t you worry, Phin. It’s old Hime for ’em now.”
He started away on the trot, with no very clear idea of what he would do first, but anxious to be moving.
Brickett was standing with shoulder set against the side of his door, one eye on the shower that was crawling up the sky, the other on a man who sat in a waggon before the store and who endeavoured to engage him in conversation. “Hard-Times” Wharff was in his favourite position on one corner of the platform, his sharp nose tilted toward the heavens and his long hair waving in the first whispers from the approaching tempest. A man who was on the other corner of the platform stepped down as the showman came up. This person accosted Hiram brusquely.
“I’ve got a little bus’ness with you, mister,” he said.
It was Captain Nymphus Bodfish, saturnine and resolute.
Hiram was about to return an impatient retort about “other matters to attend to just then,” when he caught a word of the conversation between Brickett and the man in the waggon.
“Donno who it could be, I’m sure,” said Brickett.
“I allus knew there was some fools up this way,” said the man, with rough jest, “but I didn’t reckon that any of them was fool enough to start in a dory right out past Cod Head in the teeth o’ that thing comin’ up there.”
He nodded a languid head at the big cloud.
“I tell ye,” insisted Bodfish, pressing close to Hiram, “your’n and my bus’ness will have to be ‘tended to right now.”
“Did you say that you saw a dory makin’ out past Cod Head?” shouted Hiram at the man in the waggon, looking past and over Bodfish with an utter disregard that made the skipper grit his teeth.
“’Ep! Saw it as I was comin’ up the Cove ro’d,” returned the man.
“I donno who in sanup it can be,” repeated Brickett.
“With fifty men huntin’ for Judge Coll Willard and them two young ones, that old man wand’rin’ somewheres out his senses, you ain’t got brains enough to guess who it is in that dory?” fairly screamed Hiram. “It’s blastnation lucky for you, Ase Brickett, that a man don’t need to do any thinkin’ to run his lungs, or you’d die for lack of air.”
“I say I’ve got bus’ness——” recommenced Bodfish.
“Yes, and I’ve got bus’ness with you!” barked Hiram, rushing at him so furiously that Bodfish staggered back. “This is the bus’ness: You come with me as fast as your legs will take you and start that old garsoline plunker of your’n. Hiper!”
“Not on your life! Not for you!” roared Bodfish. “I’ll fight you to a standstill first!”
Hiram did not waste words with the man. He drove both his broad hands against his breast, rushed him backward to the store wall and choked him until his tongue lolled.
“Will ye? Will ye go?” he kept saying.
But each time he loosened his grip the skipper only cursed or cried for help. He was struggling madly all the time, but Hiram’s strength and passion were too much for him.
“I don’t b’lieve in abusin’ no man,” observed Brickett from his door. “I reckon you’d better let that man go, Hime Look. You can’t sass and browbeat and bang round ev’ry one in this place.”
“You fools,” panted Hiram, “Judge Willard and those children are in that dory. There is no one else who would try to go out of this place into that storm. It’s Judge Willard, I tell you! You are goin’ to take me out, Nymp’ Bodfish, if I have to tear you apart and lug you down to your packet in pound packages. I’ll kill the man that interferes. Will you go, I say?”
He fell upon the skipper with such desperate fury that when he again released his clutch the man staggered away dizzily in his iron grip.
They disappeared around the corner of the storehouse and in a little while the sharp “plock-plock” of the Effort’s engine barked in the interim of the thunder crashes.
“Them Looks is sartinly the desp’ritest critters when they git started I ever see,” remarked the man in the waggon, after he had watched the two men out of sight.
“Well, if he weighed bigger’n that el’phunt of his he wouldn’t lug me and my own bo’t off on no such wild-goose chase as he’s goin’ on,” growled Brickett, getting ready to shut his big doors. He was apparently unconvinced regarding the occupants of the dory. “That was about the biggest piece of nerve I ever saw showed out, and I’ve seen some good ones in my day.”
“And I’ve seen some good old showers in my time,” remarked the man in the waggon, picking up his reins. “But”—a crackling explosion interrupted him—-“this is sartinly the king of old lingers.”
He larruped his horse around the corner into the shed, for the big trees were beginning to twist and moan and the big drops to lash the dust.