“Narrer to the heel and wide to the toe,
And that’s the way the Look boys go.
Good boy Phin, he don’t raise time,
But pepper-sass’s hot and hell’s in Hime.”
--Old Palermo “Plaguin’ Song.’’
When Marriner Amazeen plodded down street early next morning, he
found Uncle Lysimachus Buck perched in solitary and surly state on the
platform of Brickett’s store. A thick-foliaged maple tree shielded the
platform as long as the sun was low in the east, and the platform was
a desirable post of observation, since it commanded the Cove and the
fishing fleet, as well as the village square.
“You’ve been el’phunteerin’, hey, along with the rest of the fools in
the place?” sneered Uncle Buck as Amazeen grunted down beside him on the
platform.
“Well, I called in to see how Hime had got settled, if that’s what your
slur means,” retorted Amazeen with some resentment.
Silence fell upon them for a time.
“Where’s he put old Cabbage-leaf-ear?” asked Uncle Lysimachus at last.
“None of your dum bus’ness. Go see!”
The silence endured longer.
“I didn’t mean nothin’ to rasp your feelin’s, ‘Mad’!” his old friend
apologised at last. “All is, I pus’nally don’t want to go peekin’ so
like sin and Sancho, same’s the people in this place us’ly do when
anything comes to town that ain’t cut and dried. I’d really like
to know, though, how things is gittin’ squared ’round up to the
Squire’s.”
Amazeen remained sullenly silent, but his desire to gossip conquered his
spleen at last.
“Wals’r, Lys, it’s wuth your goin’ up,” he broke out with a chuckle.
“That el’phunt’s loomin’ up in the middle of the barn floor with her
hind leg hitched to a sill beam; them chariot carts is in the yard, the
hosses fillin’ the stalls and the tie-up, folks standin’ ’round askin’
questions, and every durn young one in town rampagin’ ’round there!
I should think it would drive the Squire out of his mind--him that has
allus lived old bach and nothin’ to bother. It has set that old mare of
his into spasms. He had to hitch her off in the woodshed, and there she
stands with her head and tail up and snortin’ and whickerin’ ev’ry
time she thinks of how that el’phunt looked when they was introduced.
El’phunt’s name, by the way, is Imogene! Don’t that beat you? Imogene!
So Hime said this mornin’. Told us she was a real pet, and he brought
her along ’cause she would take on so if he tried to shake her. He’s
had her clos’ on fifteen years, he says. Sold her when he bust up his
show, but she swatted ’round her with her trunk, Hime says, and stove
down bars and bellered Hail Columby and pulled up stakes and got away
and follered him. Hime says Imogene is the only one in the world that
ever has given a continental cuss for him and stuck to him, and he says
that him and her will allus stick to one another after this. Says he’s
li’ble to start out circussin’ ag’in.”
“I s’pose the whole neighbourhood’s standin’ ‘round, listenin’ to them
yarns, heh?” grumbled Uncle Buck.
“Well, it’s all interestin’ to hear,” declared Ama-zeen sturdily. “And
he ain’t nobody’s fool, Hime ain’t.”
“It looks to me,” Uncle Lys growled on, “as though Squire Phin had got
more’n one el’phunt on his hands. Here’s Hime a-traipsin’ back home with
that gor-rammed turn-out, and before he’s been here no time he sasses
the whole town of Palermo, throws Judge Willard over his own fence and
tears ’round gen’rally. Here’s the old row between the fam’lies busted
out ag’in, and prob’ly more to happen when Klebe Willard gits home and
hears of it.”
“Don’t you reckon that Klebe has got fully as many of Hime Look’s marks
on him now as he wants to carry?” inquired Amazeen, drily.
“Klebe Willard, cap’n of the ‘Lycurgus Webb,’ turned forty-five, and
muscled up from knockin’ down P. I. sailors, ain’t exactly the same
feller he was when Hime Look scolloped him off twenty-five years ago,”
Amazeen retorted. “I tell you, Lys, you’re going to find out that
old ‘Hard-Times’ wasn’t snuffin’ at no pansy bed when he stood there
yesterday with his nose up. He was smellin’ trouble.”
Brickett had lounged out of the store and stood munching a sliver
of cheese that he had scraped from the broad knife after serving a
customer.
“That old fool is gittin’ to be a town nuisance,” he observed. “When I
came down this mornin’ he was standin’ across from Judge Willard’s house
like a setter dog opposite a fox hole, croakin’ ‘Hard times a-comin’
to P’lermo.’ I don’t reckon that hard times is goin’ to start from Coll
Willard’s place. Leastways, if I was as well fixed as the old Judge is
I shouldn’t be reckonin’ to see hard times roostin’ on my primises just
yit awhile.”
“You ain’t alius lived in P’lermo same’s me and Lys has, Brickett,” said
Amazeen. “I don’t know what kind of things is goin’ to happen or what
kind of a hard-times bird has come to nest on Coll Willard’s place, but
it don’t take no seventh sense to smell trouble in this town now. Hime
Look will make it without meanin’ to. He ain’t nat’rally a bad man,
Hime ain’t. It’s his cussed tongue and the freaks he takes. Ev’ry one
’round him keeps gittin’ all stirred up. Long ago’s he went to the
district school he had all the girls in fidgits about the snakes and
frogs he lugged in his pants pockets--wa’n’t happy without a menagerie.
“Run away with circuses three times and old man Look had to chase him
up and bring him home. Started off once with a shelter-tent and a angle
worm in a mustard bottle and followed the fairs ’round in counties
above here. Wa’n’t scarcely eighteen then, but he had more cheek than
a Guinea nigger. Folks would listen to him shoutin’ up that ‘infant
anaconda’---that’s what he called the angle-worm--and would pay ten
cents and go in and then would come out mad as they could stick. Most
of the time he was able to keep hollerin’ so loud that no one could hear
them complainin’. He’d say: ‘The gentleman who has jest come out of
the tent states that under this canvas is the grandest sight that the
civilised world has got to offer. He advises his friends to pass in, one
and all, and behold the only infant anaconda in captivity.’ It certainly
did take cheek to run that show, but he had it.”
Amazeen went fishing in his pockets for a match.
“Well, he couldn’t always holler ’em down, could he?” inquired
Brickett, skeptically. “I should have thought that some one would ’a’
showed him up.”
The old man chuckled.
“Oh, once in a while a man would git heard and then Hime would bend down
and ask:
“‘What’s the matter with you?’
“‘Why, he ain’t longer’n your finger,’ the man would yap back.
“‘Oh, he ain’t big enough? That’s it!’ Hime would say. ‘Well, go right
back in and wait till he grows. ‘There won’t be any extry charge.’
“And then the rest of the crowd that always likes to see a man took in
would laugh and Hime would go on cheerful as a cricket. But if he’d had
less cheek he’d have got rid’ on a rail out of ev’ry fair ground.” He
closed down the little “pepper-pot” cover over his pipe bowl.
“Then there was Hime’s dancin’ turkey,” he went on, apparently enjoying
his recollections hugely. “For two or three years after that he was
’round with a fiddle and turkey and a sheet of tin. He’d put the
turkey on the tin with nettin’ around and set behind and fiddle ‘Speed
the Plough,’ and keep moving a lamp back and forth under that tin with
his toe, and the old gobbler would have to tip-toe Nancy mighty lively
to hunt for the cool places. Looked like he was jiggin’. I’m knowin’ to
it that he cleaned up sev’ral thousand dollars on that ‘dancin’ turkey,’
as he called it.
“All the time his father couldn’t do nothin’ with him! Kind of a
good-meanin’ chap, Hime allus was, though. Lib’ral with his money. Come
easy, went easy. Drove a nice team. Girls all liked him. No girl caught
him, though, till little Myry Austin got into long dresses. Hime was
nigh onto thirty then, and had gone into a general dickerin’ bus’ness
about the same as King Bradish does in town now; sold produce on
commission, you know, and handled farmin’ tools, and so forth. He got to
be real likely them days, and he reelly did think an awful sight of that
Austin girl. It straightened him all out, havin’ her take a likin’ to
him, and ’twas all understood in P’lermo as bein’ settled between
’em. And then what did young Klebe Willard do but come back from
college with a cap on the back of his head ’bout as big as a cooky and
his hair puffed out in front and puttin’ on more airs than a pigeon
on a ridgepole. And havin’ nothin’ else to do he cut out Hime, and Hime
didn’t know it for a long time, ’cause Klebe done his courtin’ on the
sly on account of the old man. And when Hime did find it out--last
one almost in the village, as us’ly happens in them cases, and got the
mitten--well, you talk about goin’ to Tophet at an angle of forty-five
with the track greased! Nothin’ but cards and hoorah-ste’boy, and tryin’
to make believe he didn’t care. I swanny, ’twas pitiful when you
knowed what was underneath.”
Amazeen sighed and bored his cane into the soil, his elbows on his
knees.
“There was excuses for him, most of us knowed that!” volunteered Uncle
Buck.
“And as though he hadn’t done enough in breakin’ up the
engagement--which wa’n’t no trouble, seein’ that Hime was so much older
and she only kind o’ silly and teetered up by havin’ a dude like Judge
Willard’s boy show her attention--Klebe had to go and sass Hime one
ev’nin’ right here in front of this store---that was when old Bruce
owned it. Hime was pretty well tea-ed up--drinkin’ some, you understand,
along with the rest--and he drove up here, leaned back and looked a long
time at Klebe, who was standin’ on the platform smokin’ a cigarette. ‘I
bought her ev’rything I could think of,’ says Hime, ‘but she had to go
dicker for a poodle-dog and trade herself off, even swap!’
“Now with Hime so wrought up and all that, Klebe ought to have passed
along, but he thought he had a tongue-walloper’s license, bein’ Coll
Willard’s boy, and started in and called Hime ev’rything he could lay
tongue to and then pitched into the Look fam’ly, root and branch in
general; called old Look an ignorant clod-hopper, and said that sendin’
Phin to college was about like tryin’ to gold-plate an Early-Rose
potater. And then he barked right out there in public--bein’
dizzy-headed by that time, I reckon--that all Myry Austin had cared
about Hime, anyway, was to watch him perform ’round her, same as boys
spit on a stick and throw it into a mill-pond for Towser to fetch back.
And when Hime still set there takin’ it, Klebe was startin’ in on
things that was worse still, when Hime came over his waggon wheel like
a pick’rel after a skip-bait and--well, when ’twas over Klebe Willard
had marks on his face that will always be there. Hime picked him
up--everyone was too scared to mess in--and lugged him on his back to
Judge Willard’s and throwed him over the fence about where he boosted
the old man to-day, and hollered: ‘Here’s something to feed to your
cat!’ Then he came back and got into his team before old Constable
Denslow had got so he could speak.
“‘I shall have to arrest you, Hime,’ he says, ‘as I reckon you’ve killed
him!’
“‘Arrest hell!’ says Hime. ‘I tried to kill him!’ And he slashed old
Denslow across the face with his whip and went out of the village,
hootin’ and gallopin’ his horse, with eighteen hundred or two thousand
dollars owin’ to people ’round here. And since that night Hime Look
ain’t been seen in this village till yesterday, and from what was
dropped by word o’ mouth ’tween him and Phin, it’s pretty plain he
ain’t been heard from by his fam’ly, either.”
He checked his garrulous narration in order to relight his pipe.
“It’s been a hard blow for Squire Phin, it all has,” observed Uncle
Buck. “Just finishing college when it happened, and havin’ the record
of bein’ the smartest critter there! He had the chance to go into a big
city law-office, but there was poor old Seth knocked flat’s a flounder,
his name on notes to wholesalers who’d sold to Hime, and feelin’ holden
for all the other debts.
“Phin done what few boys would do. He come home, put his shoulder to the
wheel and taught school and studied law between-whiles--and, well, we
all know how he’s worked it out.”
“There was more than the money side of it, too, that he had to face,”
broke in Amazeen.
“Seems as if I’ve heard hints that he was pretty fierce took in a
certain quarter,” observed Brickett, with a sly look.
“Lord, I guess there was hints and more, too,” snapped Amazeen. “Why, he
lugged Sylveny Willard’s dinner pail to and from school when they was
so young that neither noticed there was any diff’rence between Seth
Look and Coll Willard. Kind of one of those cases where two young ones
nat’rally took to each other. I was postmaster for a spell and they
wrote reg’lar when he was away to college, till all to once old Coll
knowed about it and realised that Sylveny had got out of the ABC age. He
up and howled blue murder and right on top came the Hime part. Gad, no,
he wouldn’t consider Phin Look for a son-in-law--wa’n’t pedigree enough
to him.”
Amazeen’s tone was scornful.
“That’s why he f’it off Klebe marryin’ Myry Austin year after year till
it looked as though they never would git married--and from all I hear
about the way they git along now, I reckon ’twould have been better
all around if the old Judge had f’it harder. Klebe had to break loose
and git a vessel for himself before he dared to buck the old man and
marry her. I don’t believe he really ever wanted her, anyway, but she’s
one o’ them women that’s like a sheet of fly paper--git it on your
fingers and try to pull it off and it keeps stickin’ in a new place.
She’s too pretty to have much head. Ain’t ever had anything to steady
her down, and that keeps Klebe guessin’ and mad a good part of the time
when he’s home.”
“If I’d have been Phin Look I’d have run away with Sylvena Willard years
ago,” grunted Uncle Lysimachus. “I’ll bet she’d have gone. A dummed old
hog like Coll Willard ain’t got no right to keep two people like them
apart. And more’n that, he’s torchin’ her all the time to marry King.
There ain’t a woman in this village that women-folks in trouble run to
as they do to her, and we all know what Squire Phin is to P’lermo! There
ain’t hardly a family in this town that he ain’t settled a fuss for--not
in courts and by runnin’ up bills of expense, but by kind words and
common-sense and good advice and by gittin’ right inside a critter’s
heart. A man ain’t goin’ to get rich by that way of practisin’ law,
but, by jerro, he’s earnin’ the kind of currency that they say makes
a millionnaire in eternity. He’s the husband Sylvena Willard ought to
have, and, by gad, if I was her I’d have him!”
“Did you ever stop to think, Lys,” drawled Ama-zeen, “that people who
have things pretty much their own way, without carin’ what other people
want, who tromp over commands, disobey parents, bust into fam’lies
and all that, are pretty apt to be scaly critters? Bein’ as they are,
Sylveny Willard and Phin Look deserve to have each other; but bein’ as
they are, it’s almighty likely they never will. Cuts both ways, you
see! A woman that forgets all her father has done for her and leaves him
alone in his old age and goes away to a man that he is dead ag’inst, has
got the disposition to treat a husband as bad as she has a father. May
not do it, understand--but the disposition is there. Marryin’ and givin’
in marriage is all right, but fam’ly loyalty is something, too. You want
to remember that Coll Willard probably don’t seem to her the same as he
does to us. A man that busts into a family when he knows he ain’t wanted
may be gritty and in love, and all that, but he’s puttin’ himself and
his pleasure and in-t’rests first, and lettin’ others trail. Phin Look
allus has practised what he preaches to his clients. But it has sartinly
happened bad for him--Hime’s cuttin’ up and all the rest, and it ain’t
lookin’ much better just now.”
“I had an idea they’d git married sometime,” said Brickett. “You’ll find
that Squire Phin has had some partic’lar mighty good reason for stayin’
in this little place. He don’t belong here and he never has. A drummer
told me that outside of here he’s called one of the best-read men in the
State. Judges all say that, the drummer told me. He don’t have to stay
here, not by a long shot. Yes, I thought they’d git married some day
when old Coll got through, but I guess this Hime matter comin’ up agin
will bust things forever. Klebe will take it up.”
“I’ll tell you what I think will happen now,” broke in a tall young man
who had sauntered up and had been listening.
No one asked any questions. Amazeen bored his cane deeper with indignant
twistings, as he reflected on the situation.
“I reckon she’ll give in to the Judge at last and marry King Bradish.”
The lounger spoke with tone of conviction.
Buck and Amazeen slowly turned their heads and stared at each other with
a singular look of mutual intelligence. Amazeen’s lips were set in a
straight line above his bristly brush of short chin beard. There was
a flicker of malice in Uncle Buck’s gray eyes, glittering under their
tufted brows.
When they had established a thorough understanding by means of a
prolonged stare, they simultaneously struggled to their feet and started
around the store. At the foot of the outside stairway they paused and
looked at each other again.
“Ain’t nobody else up there with him, is there?” asked Amazeen.
“No one ain’t gone up sence he opened shop,” replied Buck. “He got down
early.”’
“I don’t blame him,” snorted Amazeen. “What with el’phunt and hosses and
hoorah, and yard full and Hime hollerin’ ’round as though he was front
of his show tent, and that ding parrot of his squawkin’, ‘Crack ’em
down, gents; the old army game!’ I reckon the Squire couldn’t git away
any too early. Now-------” he paused, and the two men looked at each
other a long time, wrinkling their brows.
“If we try to plunk the news about Bradish and ‘Rissy Mayo to him at
the fust-off, he’ll shet us up by yappin’ out that he won’t listen
to slander. He handles ev’rything that’s spicy news just that way,”
observed Buck, dubiously.
The young man who dropped the remark about Bradish lounged around the
corner and stood eyeing the stairway, incertitude written large on his
vapid countenance.
Buck, with the air of a conspirator, cautiously reached out his cane and
rapped Amazeen’s foot. When the latter raised his abstracted gaze from
the ground, Buck winked prodigiously and jerked his head sideways.
Amazeen turned and eyed the young man with a shrewd twinkle of
understanding.
“Son!” he called softly. The young man came along to them.
“You ain’t ever had that talk o’ yourn with the Squire, have ye?”
A mournful wag of the head.
“Wouldn’t you like to have me’n Lys, here, to sort o’ pave the way?”
The head waggled again in token of reviving interest.
“Well, you go stand acrost the road and when you see me come to the
winder and toss out my cud o’ terbacker, you boost along up. Me’n Lys
is takin’ a friendly int’rest in the case for you. Now go ’long over
there and watch out.” He pushed the young man away hastily as he began
to stammer thanks.
“I can’t talk with the dum fool,” he growled through the corner of his
mouth, as he led the way up the stairs. “Fur’s I’m concerned I wisht he
was married to a half dozen jest like the one he’s hitched up with.
But as long’s we’ve got to git this thing to the Squire ’round Robin
Hood’s barn, Mayo’s fool makes a good road-breaker, as you might say.
Now I’ll start in on the Squire as though I was ready mad because he
has married Wat to that girl, and that will bring him up all standin’ to
argue that the marriage is a rousin’ success.”
“One that King Bradish is tryin’ to mess into and bust up, hey?”
suggested Buck with a knowing leer.
Amazeen returned the look with just as much significance, thrust his
elbow into Buck’s ribs and started up the stairs.
“You’re right,” asserted Buck. “The Squire’ll fight other folkses’
battles before he’ll take up his own--always did, always will, prob’ly.
Now, I reckon if we manage this thing right, King Bradish will get the
wickin’ put to him in good shape.”
He stopped outside the door of the office and concluded in a husky
whisper:
“Even if the Squire don’t get her, Lys, let’s fix it so that King
Bradish never will. Sylveny Willard’s too good a girl to be wasted that
way, and if the Judge gits devil-set enough he’s li’ble to drive her
right into it. Now we’ll ste’boy the Squire onto King in spite of
himself.”
“That critter has rid’ around town with his nose up ‘bout’s long as I
can stand it,” said Amazeen.
“He’s a stuck-up, blame-fired skunk, that’s what he is,” snapped Buck,
the memory of certain sneers about “Palermo’s mossbacks” burning hotly
with him.
The conspirators composed their faces and went in.