Chapter 11

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.

XV

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.

XVI

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.