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He never doubted its wickedness, and considered himself forever shut out from those rewards that would fall to the righteous who loved church and could sit still there without jiggling or writhing or twisting or scratching. He was a little diverted from his tortures by the arrival of the Whipples.
"Got his father's vagabond blood in his veins," declared Judge Penniman. "Crazy, too, like his father. You can't tell me Dave Cowan was in his right mind when the Whipples offered, in so many words, to set him up in any business he wanted to name, and pay all expenses, and he spurned 'em like so much dirt beneath his heel.
There the three existing male Whipples sat about a long, magazine-littered table in the library and smoked and thought and at long intervals favoured one another with fragmentary speech.
The others most concerned, had he allowed it to be known, would have been amazed by it Winona Penniman most of all. Winona's conviction was that the rejected Cowan twin conspicuously lacked those qualities that would make him desirable for adoption by any family of note, certainly not by Whipples. He had gone from bad to worse. Driving a truck had been bad.
"You'll probably go into better houses than that some day," he merely said, and added: "You learn a good trade like mine and you can always go anywhere; always make your good money and be more independent than Whipples or even kings in their palaces. Remember that, Sputterboy." "Yes, sir," said Wilbur.
Late that afternoon the three older Whipples, on the piazza of the Whipple New Place, painfully discussed the scene of the previous evening. It was felt by two of them that some tragic event impended. Sharon alone was cheerful. From time to time he admonished the other two to sit tight. "He'll tell you you ain't any longer a father of his, or a grandfather, either, but sit tight!"
This was in the days of an earlier Newbern, when the twins were four and Winona Penniman began to be their troubled mentor troubled lest they should not grow up to be refined persons; a day when Dave Cowan, the widely travelled printer, could rightly deride its citizenry as small-towners; a day when the Whipples were Newbern's sole noblesse and the Cowan twins not yet torn asunder.
Here the Whipples have always gone to war for their country Revolutionary War and 1812, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American Harvey D. was in that. Didn't do much fighting, but he was belligerent enough. And now this son of his sets back and talks about his reactions! What I say he's a Whipple in name only."
Like that time when she started to run off and found us in the graveyard -remember?" They laughed about this, rehearsing that far-off day with its vicissitudes and sudden fall of wealth. "That was the first day the Whipples noticed me," said Merle. "I made such a good impression on them they decided to take me." At another time they talked of their future. Wilbur was hazy about his own.
He would want to take it back and put it behind those bars in the bank where no one could get it. But he couldn't ever have it back, because it was spent. Still, he might do something with the spender. The Wilbur twin slunk farther into friendly shadows, and not until the groups separated and the four Whipples were in their waiting carriage did he venture into the revealing sunlight.
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