Chapter 23

He put his arm about the indignant Cap'n and drew him in where the loafers couldn't listen, and continued his anxious coaxings until at last Cap'n Sproul kicked and stamped his way into the kitchen, cursing so horribly that the cat fled. He got a little initial satisfaction by throwing after her the dirty dishes in the sink, listening to their crashing with supreme satisfaction. Then he proceeded to get supper.

It had been a long time since he had indulged his natural taste for cookery. In a half-hour he had forgotten his anger and was revelling in the domain of pots and pans. He felt a sudden appetite of his own for the good, old-fashioned plum-duff of shipboard days, and started one going. Then gingercake--his own kind--came to his memory. He stirred up some of that. He sent Hiram on a dozen errands to the grocery, and Hiram ran delightedly.

"I'll show you whether I can cook or not," was the Cap'n's proud boast to the showman when the latter bustled eagerly in from one of his trips. He held out a smoking doughnut on a fork. "There ain't one woman in ten can fry 'em without 'em soakin' fat till they're as heavy as a sinker."

Hiram gobbled to the last mouthful, expressing his admiration as he ate, and the Cap'n glowed under the praise.

His especial moment of triumph came when his wife and Mrs. Look, adventuring to seek their truant husbands, sat for a little while in the tavern kitchen and ate a doughnut, and added their astonished indorsement. In the flush of his masterfulness he would not permit them to lay finger on dish, pot, or pan.

Hiram served as waiter to the lonely guest in the dining-room, and was the bearer of several messages of commendation that seemed to anger the Cap'n as much as other praise gratified him.

"Me standin' here cookin' for that sculpin!" he kept growling.

However, he ladled out an especially generous portion of plum-duff--the climax of his culinary art--and to his wrathful astonishment Hiram brought it back untasted.

"Mebbe it's all right," he said, apologetically, "but he was filled full, and he said it was a new dish to him and didn't look very good, and--"

The Cap'n grabbed the disparaged plum-duff with an oath and started for the dining-room.

"Hold on!" Hiram expostulated; "you've got to remember that he's a guest, Cap. He's--"

"He's goin' to eat what I give him, after I've been to all the trouble," roared the old skipper.

Mr. Brackett was before the fire in the office, hiccuping with repletion and stuffing tobacco into the bowl of his clay pipe.

"Anything the matter with that duff?" demanded the irate cook, pushing the dish under Mr. Brackett's retreating nose. "Think I don't know how to make plum-duff--me that's sailed the sea for thutty-five years?"

"Never made no such remarks on your cookin'," declared the guest, clearing his husky throat in which the food seemed to be sticking.

"Hain't got no fault to find with that plum-duff?"

"Not a mite," agreed Mr. Brackett, heartily.

"Then you come back out here to the table and eat it. You ain't goin' to slander none of my vittles that I've took as much trouble with as I have with this."

"But I'm full up--chock!" pleaded Mr. Brackett. "I wisht I'd have saved room. I reckon it's good. But I ain't carin' for it."

"You'll come out and eat that duff if I have to stuff it down your thro't with the butt of your hoss-whip," said the Cap'n with an iciness that was terrifying. He grabbed the little man by the collar and dragged him toward the dining-room, balancing the dish in the other hand.

"I'll bust," wailed Mr. Brackett.

"Well, that bump will make a little room," remarked Cap'n Sproul, jouncing him down into a chair.

He planted one broad hand on the table and the other on his hip, and stood over the guest until the last crumb of the duff was gone, although Mr. Brackett clucked hiccups like an overfed hen. The Cap'n felt some of his choler evaporate, indulging in this sweet act of tyranny.

Resentment came slowly into the jovial nature of meek Todd Ward Brackett. But as he pushed away from the table he found courage to bend baleful gaze on his over-hospitable host.

"I've put up at a good many taverns in my life," he said, "and I'm allus willin' to eat my fair share of vittles, but I reckon I've got the right to say how much!"

"If you're done eatin'," snapped the Cap'n, "get along out, and don't stay round in the way of the help." And Mr. Brackett retired, growling over this astonishing new insult.

He surveyed the suspended alligator gloomily, as he stuffed tobacco into his pipe.

"Better shet them jaws," he advised, "or now that he's crazy on the plum-duff question he'll be jamming the rest of that stuff into you."

"You can't say outside that the table ain't all right or that folks go away hungry under the new management," remarked Hiram, endeavoring to palliate.

"New management goin' to inorg'rate the plum-duffin' idee as a reg'lar system?" inquired Mr. Brackett, sullenly. "If it is, I'll stay over to-morrow and see you operate on the new elder that's goin' to supply the pulpit Sunday--pervidin' he stays here."

Hiram blinked his eyes inquiringly. "New elder?" he repeated.

"Get a few elders to put up here," suggested Mr. Brackett, venomously, "and new management might take a little cuss off'm the reppytation of this tavern." And the guest fell to smoking and muttering.

Even as wisdom sometimes falls from the mouths of babes, so do good ideas occasionally spring from careless sarcasm.

After Mr. Brackett had retired Hiram discussed the matter of the impending elder with Cap'n Sproul, the Cap'n not warming to the proposition.

"But I tell you if we can get that elder here," insisted Hiram, "and explain it to him and get him to stay, he's goin' to look at it in the right light, if he's got any Christian charity in him. We'll entertain him free, do the right thing by him, tell him the case from A to Z, and get him to handle them infernal wimmen. Only an elder can do it. If we don't he may preach a sermon against us. That'll kill our business proposition deader'n it is now. If he stays it will give a tone to the new management, and he can straighten the thing out for us."

Not only did Cap'n Sproul fail to become enthusiastic, but he was so distinctly discouraging that Hiram forbore to argue, feeling his own optimistic resolution weaken under this depressing flow of cold water.

He did not broach the matter the next morning. He left the Cap'n absorbed and busy in his domain of pots, set his jaws, took his own horse and pung, and started betimes for the railroad-station two miles away. On the way he overtook and passed, with fine contempt for their podgy horse, a delegation from the W.T.W.'s.

On the station platform they frowned upon him, and he scowled at them. He realized that his only chance in this desperate venture lay in getting at the elder first, and frisking him away before the women had opportunity to open their mouths. A word from them might check operations. And then, with the capture once made, if he could speed his horse fast enough to allow him an uninterrupted quarter of an hour at the tavern with the minister, he decided that only complete paralysis of the tongue could spoil his plan.

Hiram, with his superior bulk and his desperate eagerness, had the advantage of the women at the car-steps. He crowded close. It was the white-lawn tie on the first passenger who descended that did the business for Hiram. In his mind white-lawn ties and clergymen were too intimately associated to admit of error. He yanked away the little man's valise, grabbed his arm, and rushed him across the platform and into the pung's rear seat. And the instant he had scooped the reins from the dasher he flung himself into the front seat and was away up the road, larruping his horse and ducking the snow-cakes that hurtled from the animal's hoofs.

"Look here! I--I--" gasped the little man, prodding him behind.

"It's all right, elder!" bellowed Hiram. "You wait till we get there and it will be made all right. Set clus' and hold on, that's all now!"

"But, look here, I want to go to Smyrna tavern!"

"Good for you!" Hiram cried. "Set clus' and you'll get there!" It seemed, after all, that ill repute had not spread far. His spirits rose, and he whipped on at even better speed.

"If this isn't life or death," pleaded the little man, "you needn't hurry so." Several "thank-you-marms" had nearly bounced him out.

"Set clus'," advised the driver, and the little man endeavored to obey the admonition, clinging in the middle of the broad seat.

Hiram did not check speed even on the slope of the hill leading into the village, though the little man again lifted voice of fear and protest. So tempestuous was the rush of the pung that the loafers in Broadway's store hustled out to watch. And they saw the runners strike the slush-submerged plank-walk leading across the square, beheld the end of the pung flip, saw the little man rise high above the seat with a fur robe in his arms and alight with a yell of mortal fright in the mushy highway, rolling over and over behind the vehicle.

Helping hands of those running from the store platform picked him up, and brought his hat, and stroked the slush out of his eyes so that he could see Hiram Look sweeping back to recover his passenger.

"You devilish, infernal jayhawk of a lunatic!" squealed the little man. "Didn't I warn you not to drive so fast?"

Hiram's jaw dropped at the first blast of that irreligious outbreak. But the white-lawn tie reassured him. There was no time for argument. Before those loafers was no fit place. He grabbed up the little man, poked him into the pung, held him in with one hand and with the other drove furiously to the tavern porch. With equal celerity he hustled him into the office.

"You ain't in any condition to talk business jest now till you're slicked off a little, elder," he began in tones of abject apology.

"You bet your jeeroosly life I'm not!" cried the little man in a perfect frenzy of fury.

Again Hiram opened his mouth agitatedly, and his eyebrows wrinkled in pained surprise. Yet once more his eyes sought the white tie and his hand reached for the little man's arm, and, feeling at a loss just then for language of explanation, he hurried him up-stairs and into a room whose drawn curtains masked some of its untidiness.

"You wash up, elder," he counselled. "I won't let anybody disturb you, and then whatever needs to be explained will be all explained. Don't you blame me till you know it all." And he backed out and shut the door.

He faced the Cap'n at the foot of the stairs. The Cap'n had been watching intently the ascent of the two, and had gathered from the little man's scuffles and his language that he was not a particularly enthusiastic guest.

"They come hard, but we must have 'em, hey?" he demanded, grimly. "This is worse than shanghaiing for a Liverpool boardin'-house, and I won't--"

"S-s-s-sh!" hissed Hiram, flapping his hand. "That's the elder."

"An elder? A man that uses that kind of language?"

"He's had good reason for it," returned Hiram, fervently. "It's stout talk, but I ain't blamin' him." He locked the outside door. "Them Double-yer T. Double-yers will be flockin' this way in a few minutes," he said, in explanation, "but they'll have to walk acrost me in addition to the doormat to get him before I've had my say."

But even while he was holding the unconvinced Cap'n by the arm and eagerly going over his arguments, once more they heard the treading of many feet in the office. There were the W.T.W.'s in force, and they had with them a tall, gaunt man; and the presence of Mrs. Look and Mrs. Sproul, flushed but determined, indicated that the citadel had been betrayed from the rear.

"I present to you Reverend T. Thayer, gents," said the president, icily, "and seein' that he is field-secretary of the enforcement league, and knows his duty when he sees it clear, he will talk to you for your own good, and if it don't do you good, I warn you that there will be something said from the pulpit to-morrow that will bring down the guilty in high places."

"The elder!" gasped Hiram, whirling to gaze aghast at the Cap'n. Then he turned desperate eyes up at the ceiling, where creaking footsteps sounded. "Who in the name o' Jezebel--" he muttered.

Above there was a sort of spluttering bark of a human voice, and the next moment there was a sound as of some one running about wildly. Then down the stairs came the guest, clattering, slipping, and falling the last few steps as he clung to the rail. His eyes were shut tight, his face was dripping, and he was plaintively bleating over and over: "I'm poisoned! I'm blind!"

Hiram ran to him and picked him up from where he had fallen. His coat and vest were off, and his suspenders trailed behind him. One sniff at his frowsled hair told Hiram the story. The little man's topknot was soppy with whiskey; his face was running with it; his eyes were full of it. And the next moment the doubtful aroma had spread to the nostrils of all. And the one-eyed hostler and liquor depository, standing on the outskirts of the throng that he had solicitously followed in, slapped palm against thigh and cried: "By Peter, that's the gallon I poured in the water-pitcher and forgot where I left it!"

"Didn't I tell you and command you and order you to throw away all the liquor round this place, you one-eyed sandpipe?" demanded Hiram, furiously.

"There was a lot of hidin' done in a hurry when they come down on Ferd," pleaded the hostler, "and I forgot where I hid that gallon!"

The little man had his smarting eyes open. "Whiskey?" he mumbled, dragging his hand over his hair and sniffing at his fingers.

"You heard what that renegade owned up to," shouted Hiram, facing the women. "I gave him his orders. I give him his orders now. You jest appoint your delegation, wimmen! Don't you hold me to blame for rum bein' here. You foller that man! And if he don't show you where every drop is hid and give it into your hands to spill, I'll--I'll--" He paused for a threat, cast his eyes about him, and tore down the alligator from the ceiling, seized it by the stiff tail and poised it like a cudgel. "I'll meller him within an inch of his life."

"That sounds fair and reasonable, ladies," said the clergyman, "though, of course, we don't want any violence."

"I'm always fair and reasonable," protested Hiram, "when folks come at me in a fair and reasonable way. You talk to them wimmen, elder, about bein' fair and reasonable themselves, and then lead 'em back here, and you'll find me ready to pull with 'em for the good of this place, without tryin' to run cross-legged or turn a yoke or twist the hames."

When the reformers had departed on the heels of the cowed hostler, Hiram surveyed with interest the little man who was left alone with them.

"I--I--reckon I've got a little business to talk over with you," faltered the old showman, surveying him ruefully. The little man took a parting sniff at his finger-tips.

"You think, do you, that you've got over being driven up and that now you can stop flying and perch a few minutes?" inquired the little man with biting irony.

"I'll 'tend to your case now jest as close as I can," returned Hiram, meekly.

"Well," proceeded the little man, after boring Hiram and then the Cap'n for a time with steely eyes, "I happened to run across one Ferdinand Parrott on the train, and he seemed to have what I've been looking for, a property that I can convert into a sanitarium. My name is Professor Diamond, and I am the inventor of the Telauto--"

But Hiram's curiosity did not extend to the professor's science.

"The idee is," he broke in, eagerly, "did Ferd Parrott say anything about a morgidge and bill of sale bein' on this property, and be you prepared to clear off encumbrances?"

"I am," declared the professor promptly.

"Then you take it," snapped Hiram, with comprehensive sweep of his big hand. He kicked the alligator into the fireplace, took down his overcoat and shrugged his shoulders into it. "Get your money counted and come 'round to town office for your papers."

While he was buttoning it the Reverend Thayer returned, leading the ladies of the Women's Temperance Workers, Miss Philamese Nile at his side. But Hiram checked her first words.

"You talk to him after this," he said, with a chuck of his thumb over his shoulder toward the professor. "Speakin' for Cap'n Aaron Sproul and myself, I take the liberty to here state that we are now biddin' farewell to the tavern business in one grand tableau to slow music, lights turned low and the audience risin' and singin' 'Home, Sweet Home'." He strode out by the front way, followed by Mrs. Look.

"Had you just as soon come through the kitchen with me?" asked the Cap'n in a whisper as he approached his wife. "I'm goin' to do up what's left of that plum-duff and take it home. It kind o' hits my tooth!"

XXIX

Mr. Aholiah Luce, of the Purgatory Hollow section of Smyrna, stood at bay on the dirt-banking of his "castle," that is, a sagged-in old hulk of a house of which only the L was habitable.

He was facing a delegation of his fellow-citizens, to wit: Cap'n Aaron Sproul, first selectman of the town; Hiram Look, Zeburee Nute, constable; and a nervous little man with a smudge of smut on the side of his nose--identity and occupation revealed by the lettering on the side of his wagon:

T. TAYLOR STOVES AND TINWARE VIENNA

Mr. Luce had his rubber boots set wide apart, and his tucked-in trousers emphasized the bow in his legs. With those legs and his elongated neck and round, knobby head, Mr. Luce closely resembled one of a set of antique andirons.

"You want to look out you don't squdge me too fur in this," said Mr. Luce, warningly. "I've been squdged all my life, and I've 'bout come to the limick. Now look out you don't squdge me too fur!"

He side-stepped and stood athwart his door, the frame of which had been recently narrowed by half, the new boarding showing glaringly against the old. When one understood the situation, this new boarding had a very significant appearance.

Mr. Luce had gone over into Vienna, where his reputation for shiftiness was not as well known, and had secured from Mr. T. Taylor, recently set up in the stove business, a new range with all modern attachments, promising to pay on the instalment plan. Stove once installed, Mr. Luce had immediately begun to "improve" his mansion by building a new door-frame too narrow to permit the exit of the stove. Then Mr. Luce had neglected to pay, and, approached by replevin papers, invoked the statute that provides that a man's house cannot be ripped in pieces to secure goods purchased on credit.

Constable Nute, unable to cope with the problem, had driven to Smyrna village and summoned the first selectman, and the Cap'n had solicited Hiram Look to transport him, never having conquered his sailor's fear of a horse.

"It ain't goin' to be twitted abroad in Vienny nor any other town that we let you steal from outsiders in any such way as this," declared the first selectman, once on the ground. "Folks has allus cal'lated on your stealin' about so much here in town in the run of a year, and haven't made no great fuss about it. But we ain't goin' to harbor and protect any general Red Rover and have it slurred against this town. Take down that scantlin' stuff and let this man have his stove."

"You can squdge me only so fur and no furder," asserted Luce, sullenly, holding down his loose upper lip with his yellow teeth as though to keep it from flapping in the wind. Within the mansion there was the mellow rasp of a tin of biscuit on an oven floor, the slam of an oven door, and Mrs. Luce appeared dusting flour from her hands. All who knew Mrs. Luce knew that she was a persistent and insistent exponent of the belief of the Millerites--"Go-uppers," they called the sect in Smyrna.

"I say you've got to open up and give this man his property," cried Cap'n Sproul, advancing on them.

"Property? Who talks of property?" demanded Mrs. Luce, her voice hollow with the hollowness of the prophet. "No one knows the day and the hour when we are to be swept up. It is near at hand. We shall ride triumphant to the skies. And will any one think of property and the vain things of this world then?"

"Prob'ly not," agreed the Cap'n, sarcastically, "and there won't be any need of a cook-stove in the place where your husband will fetch up. He can do all his cookin' on a toastin'-fork over an open fire--there'll be plenty of blaze."

"Don't squdge me too fur," repeated Mr. Luce, clinging to the most expressive warning he could muster just then.

"It's full time for that critter to be fetched up with a round turn," muttered Constable Nute, coming close to the elbow of the first selectman, where the latter stood glowering on the culprit. "I reckon you don't know as much about him as I do. When his mother was nussin' him, a helpless babe, he'd take the pins out'n her hair, and they didn't think it was anything but playin'. Once he stole the specs off'm her head whilst she was nappin' with him in her arms, and jammed 'em down a hole in the back of the rockin'-chair. Whilst old Doc Burns was vaccinatin' him--and he wa'n't more'n tew years old--he got Doc's watch."

"Those things would kind of give you a notion he'd steal, give him a fair chance," commented Hiram, dryly.

"He's stole ever since--everything from carpet tacks to a load of hay," snapped the constable, "till folks don't stop to think he's stealin'. He's got to be like rats and hossflies and other pests--you cuss 'em, but you reckon they've come to stay."

"I've abated some of the nuisances in this town," stated the Cap'n, "and I cal'late I'm good for this one, now that it's been stuck under my nose. Why haven't you arrested him in times past, same as you ought to have done?"

"Wasn't any one who would swear out complaints," said the constable. "He's allus been threatenin' what kairosene and matches would do to barns; and it wouldn't be no satisfaction to send 'Liah Luce to State Prison--he ain't account enough. It wouldn't pay the loser for a stand of buildin's--havin' him there."

Cap'n Sproul began to understand some of the sane business reasons that guaranteed the immunity of Aholiah Luce, so long as he stuck to petty thieving. But this international matter of the town of Vienna seemed to the first selectman of Smyrna to be another sort of proposition. And he surveyed the recalcitrant Mr. Luce with malignant gaze.

"I've never seen you backed down by nobody," vouchsafed the admiring constable, anxious to shift his own responsibility and understanding pretty well how to do it. "I've allus said that if there was any man could run this town the way it ought to be run you was the man to do it."

Cap'n Sproul was not the kind to disappoint the confident flattery of those who looked up to him. He buttoned his pea-jacket, and set his hat firmly on his head. Mr. Luce noted these signs of belligerency and braced his firedog legs.

"It's the meek that shall inherit, ye want to remember that!" croaked Mrs. Luce. "And the crowned heads and the high and mighty--where will they be then?"

"They won't be found usin' a stolen cook-stove and quotin' Scriptur'," snorted the Cap'n in disgust.

"It ain't been stole," insisted Mr. Luce. "It was bought reg'lar, and it can't be took away without mollywhackin' my house--and I've got the law on my side that says you can't do it."

Cap'n Sproul was close to the banking.

"Luce," he said, savagely, "I ain't out here to-day to discuss law p'ints nor argy doctrines of religion. You've got a stove there that belongs to some one else, and you either pay for it or give it up. I'm willin' to be fair and reasonable, and I'll give you fifteen seconds to pay or tear down that door framework."