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We watched Minnie and Sam with our hearts in our mouths for fear she'd carry it too far and lose him, for every one had it straight from Mary Askinson, who is intimately acquainted with a close friend of Minnie's old school chum, that Minnie had been in love with Sam since they graduated from the high school together.
But just then Sim Askinson came up all out of breath and burst through the crowd. Sim is little and meek and has a hard time holding his own, even in our peaceful world. But when he saw Banks, he snorted like a war horse and grew up three inches. "Hello, Pudge, you old son-of-a-gun!" he said, with both hands in his pockets. "Hello, Sim!" said Banks, sort of startled.
Then Sim Askinson raps on his music rack and says: "Gentlemen and trombone players," as he has for a quarter of a century; and a minute later the band is tumbling eagerly through its piece once more, all feuds suspended in the desperate effort to come out even at the end with no surplus bars to be played by some floundering horn.
Most of our lines have four subscribers apiece, and it's just as hard to live in friendliness on a party line as it is for four families to get along good-naturedly in the same house. There's Mrs. Sim Askinson, for instance. She's a good woman and her pies have produced more deep religious satisfaction at the Methodist church socials than many a sermon. But St.
I don't know anything more magnificent than the way our band plays "Poet and Peasant" with Sim Askinson leading, Ad Smith and Henry Aultmeyer duetting perfectly for once with their cornets, and the clarionet section eating up the fast parts in a manner that sends goose flesh up and down your spine. We're head and shoulders above any other band that enters the contests, but that's the trouble.
We wept for joy and elected him leader on the spot. This caused Sim Askinson to resign, of course, and he took Ad and Ed Smith with him, and they remained in dignified and awful silence for two years. But we didn't care. One saxophone was worth five baritones, and while Williams was in town, we were an object of envy to all of the other bands around.
Askinson can talk an hour on this fertile subject, stopping each minute or two to say, with the most corrosive dignity, to some poor victim who is wiggling his receiver hook: "Please get off this line, whoever you are. Haven't you any manners? I'm talking, and I'll talk till I get through."
Take Sadie Askinson for instance. Her husband wanted to run for member of the school board, and Sadie didn't want him to, because he was away from home enough nights anyway, goodness knows. Sim was stubborn, and said the night before election that he was going down and have some ballots printed, anyway, and run.
"We'll get Wimble and we'll break up band practice if you'll stay over." "No, you don't," said Sim. "I won't have riff-raff loafing around my band." "You won't, eh?" said Banks. "We'll show you. Come down to the car while I send about forty telegrams, and then we'll fix you, Mister Askinson." Which they did that night, while most of the town looked on.
After a while I learned how to fit my face into the mouthpiece in just the right way, and as the sounds I made became more human, I sort of edged into town, until finally I was practicing in our own barn. And the next year Askinson let me come into the band and "pad" as second alto during the less important engagements.
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