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Don't you nor any one else move a shovelful of dirt till I tell you to." Hiram Look, retired showman and steady loafer in the selectman's office, rolled his long cigar across his lips and grunted indorsement. "Squawnk!" The appeal outside was a bit more insistent. Mr. Gammon sighed.
The more prudent among Smyrna's voters had hesitated about making the irascible ex-mariner a candidate for selectman's berth. But Smyrna, in its placid New England eddy, had felt its own little thrill from the great tidal wave of municipal reform sweeping the country.
You can't look at this deputy sheriff without turning redder than one of the apples in that fake picture book of yours. You know what you have been doing in this town." The selectman's tone was offensively harsh and loud. Mr. Harnden was moved to show a little spirit, having been cornered and feeling protected by the presence of an officer of the law. "I have been doing business!"
Furthermore, Cap'n Sproul, left outside the pale, might conquer dislike of law and invoke an injunction. The next morning, bright and early, he trudged over to the first selectman's house and bearded the sullen autocrat in his sitting-room. He felt that the peace of the Cap'n's home was better suited to be the setting of overtures of friendship than the angular interior of the town office.
Constable Zeburee Nute, emerging at a brisk trot from the town office, had a warning word of counsel for all those intending to venture upon the first selectman's privacy. He delivered it at Broadway's store. "Talk about your r'yal Peeruvian tigers with eighteen rings on their tails!
"I tell you that critter is dangerous, and you've got to get him. Instead of quietin' down he'll be growin' worse." There were eleven men in Smyrna, besides Zeburee Nute, who held commissions as constables, and those valiant officers Cap'n Sproul called into the first selectman's office that forenoon. He could not tell them any news.
It was so preposterous and so ghastly to see him carrying on so, with his white linen and his fine black wedding-clothes and the gray hair that would have covered a selectman's head in another year it was all so absurdly horrible that we simply stood as we were in the church and wondered and looked at Mary Matheson and saw her face still rapt and quiet, and still set in that same bedevilled smile, as if she didn't know that round tears were running in streams down her cheeks.
In the words of Mr. Snell, when he came out from behind the watering-trough: "It was a corn-cracker!" A half-hour later Mr. Nute, after sadly completing a canvass of the situation, headed a delegation that visited Cap'n Sproul in the selectman's office, where he sat, pallid with rage, and cursing. "A hundred and seventeen lights of glass," announced Mr.
However, the warning delivered at Broadway's store did not reach a certain tall, thin man; for the tall, thin man stalked straight through the village and up to the door inscribed "Selectman's Office." In his hand he carried a little valise about as large as a loaf of yeast bread. The shrewish December wind snapped trousers about legs like broom-handles.
"Who says he won't?" snapped Walky Dexter, who heard the selectman's statement. "You ax the Elder or old Bill Jones," chortled Moore. "Come now! what do you mean by that?" demanded Mr. Massey, in whose store the conversation took place. "Ax 'em," said Mr. Moore again. "They've got it fixed up to fire Mr. Haley at the end of this term." "Nothin' like bein' warned in time," said Walky Dexter.
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