"If you've got anything to tell me, why in the name of the three-toed
Cicero don't you tell it?" blurted the Cap'n, indignantly.

He got up and brushed the dirt off his knees. "If there's anything
that stirs my temper, it's this mumble-grumble, whiffle-and-hint
business. Out and open, that's my style." He was reflecting testily
on the peculiar reticence of his wife.

"I agree with you," replied Hiram, calmly. But his mind was on another
phase of the question. "If she had been out and open it wouldn't have
been so bad. It's this hintin' that does the most mischief. Give folks
a hint, and a nasty imagination will do the rest. That's the way she's
workin' it."

"She? Who?"

"Your mesmerist fellow's runnin' mate--that woman that calls herself
Madame Dawn, and reads the past and tells the future."

"There ain't nobody can do no such thing," snapped Cap'n Sproul.
"They're both frauds, and I didn't want 'em in town, and I was right
about it."

"Bein' as how I was in the show business thirty years, you needn't
feel called on to post me on fakes," said Hiram, tartly. "But the
bigger the fake is the better it catches the crowd. If she'd simply
been an old scandal-monger at a quiltin'-bee and started a story
about us, we could run down the story and run old scandal-grabber
up a tree. But when a woman goes into a trance and a sperit comes
teeterin' out from the dark behind the stage and drops a white robe
over her, and she begins to occult, or whatever they call it, and
speaks of them in high places, and them with fat moneybags, and that
ain't been long in our midst, and has come from no one jest knows
where, and that she sees black shadders followin' 'em, along with
wimmen weepin' and wringin' of their hands--well, when a woman sets
on the town-hall stage and goes on in that strain for a half-hour,
it ain't the kind of a show that I want to be at--not with my wife
and yourn on the same settee with me."

He scowled on the Cap'n's increasing perturbation.

"A man is a darned fool to fight a polecat, Cap'n Sproul, and you
ought to have known better than to let drive at him as you did."

"She didn't call names, did she?" asked the Cap'n.

"Call names! Of course she didn't call names. Didn't have to. There's
the difference between scandal and occultin'. We can't get no bind
on her for what she said. Now here are you and me, back here to settle
down after roamin' the wide world over; jest got our feet placed,
as you might