and large
lumps of cravats at their throats, lounged in store doors. The most
conspicuous, as the most institutional, feature of the landscape was the
group idling on boxes in front of the old Grange store--just as they had
idled on boxes before the war. They were the same men, it was the same
store, and it was not inconceivable that they were the same boxes. As
the men idled they spat, somewhat to the menace of the passers-by,
though in defence of this avocation it may be argued that any truly
agile person, by watching carefully and seizing opportunity
unhesitatingly, could get by undefiled. Sometimes a vehicle rolled into
the street toward the Square, and when this happened it was amusement to
the men to say whose vehicle without looking up--jack-knives,
watch-fobs, and other valuables occasionally changing hands on an erring
guess between the slow, solemn trot of Mr. Azariah's Pringle's Bess and
the duck-like waddling of Mrs. Molly Jenkins' Tom, or between the
swinging canter of Miss Sally Madeira's Kentucky blacks and the running
walk of the small-hoofed Texas ponies from We-all Prairie. Once a great
waggon, piled high with cotton, creaked by; once a burnt-skinned boy,
hard as a nut, shrieking with an irrepressible sense of being alive,
loped past on a mustang. Once a small, old man, in mean clothes and with
a fine bearing, crossed the Square, cracking his whip nervously, his
spur clicking on his boot as he walked. Once a large florid man and a
tall girl came down the street and entered the door of a two-story brick
building next the Grange. The man had an expansive, blustering way. The
girl looked as though she were accustomed to admire the man and to
badger him; her face was turned up to his adoringly, while her
fun-hunting eyes, just sheathed under her lids, gleamed gaily. The
building had a plate-glass window across the front of it, and on the
window, in gold letters bordered in black, two legends were flung to the
public:

BANK OF CANAAN

CRITTENTON MADEIRA

When the man and the girl had gone into the Bank of Canaan, the group at
the Grange stopped gambling on the incoming teams and talked less
drowsily.

"Looks like that girl gets purdier and purdier."

"Mighty pleasant ways she keeps. Never gone back on her raisin'. Never
got too good for Mizzourah."

"As far as I go, I like her ways better'n her pappy's ways."

"Crit _is_ a little toploftical."