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Presently he was twiddling his pudgy toes and concentrating on Sarah Pound. He waggled his head. "After livin' out there," he said to himself, "she'll think Coldriver's livin' and so 'tis, so 'tis.... More sometimes 'n 'tis others. Calculate this is like to be one of 'em...." Scattergood was just thinking about dinner on Monday when Nahum Pound brought his daughter Sarah into the store.
Why, if you was sick so's to be absent from that meetin' the Congregationalists 'u'd win, hands down." "I b'lieve it," said the deacon, "and nothin' on earth'll keep me away nothin'. If I was a-layin' at my last gasp I'd git myself carried there." "Deacon," said Scattergood, solemnly, "much is dependin' on you. Coldriver's fort'nit to have sich a man at the helm."
Scattergood's capacity for wanting was abnormal, and his ability to want until he got was what made him the remarkable figure in the life of his state that he was destined to become. Scattergood was sitting on the piazza of his hardware store, basking in the sunshine, and gazing up the dusty road which passed between Coldriver's business structures, and disappeared over the hill.
When he came out of that service the mischief was done he had been converted to the tenets of immersion and straightway withdrew from the church of his birth to enter the fold of its bitterest rival in Coldriver, if it were possible for the Baptists to be bitterer rivals of the Congregationalist than the Methodists and Universalists were. Coldriver's population was less than four hundred.
A canvass of the situation showed them that the new Prohibitionists, though they talked loud and long, were made up mainly of the discontented and of a few men always ready to join any novel movement, and promised at best to poll not to exceed forty votes of Coldriver's registered three hundred and eighty.
"Meals to the tavern perty good?" Coldriver's new citizen asked. "Say," demanded Locker, "be you really thinkin' about startin' a cash store here?" "Neighbor," said Scattergood, "never give up valuable information without gittin' somethin' for it. How much money would a complete and careful account of my intentions be worth to you?" Locker snorted.
Even when Pettybone's leg was mashed by a log, and he lay between life and death, there was no hint of a reconciliation; and when Pettybone appeared again on Coldriver's streets, hobbling on a peg leg of his own fashioning, the fires of vindictiveness burned higher and hotter than ever. The situation would have been hopeless to anybody not possessed of Scattergood's optimism and resource.
But when, on a certain Monday morning, a strange and unquestionably pretty girl, dressed not according to Coldriver's ideas of current fashions, made her appearance in a space cleared in the middle of the store, and there proceeded to make and dispense tiny cups of a new brand of coffee, the village considered that Jason had gone too far.
All of you give up to furrin missions to rescue naked fellers with rings in their noses. That's sympathy, hain't it? Mebby they hain't needin' sympathy and cast-off pants, but that's neither here nor there. You think they do.... Coldriver's great on sympathy, and it's a doggone upstandin' quality." Again the audience sucked in its breath at this approach to the language of everyday life.
Baxter, registered from Boston, was at the hotel, and that his business was selling shares of stock in a mine which did not exist to gullible folks who wanted to become wealthy without spending any labor in the process. He did a thriving business. It was Coldriver's first experience with this particular method of extracting money from the public, and it came to the front handsomely. Mr.
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