“No. But damn it all, Wint! Listen—”
“I don’t want to listen,” Wint told him. “I’m through. Court’s adjourned. Don’t—”
“You’re turning the town over to the bums,” Foster protested.
“They can’t run it any worse,” said Wint, and took his hat and departed. Foster swore. Marshal Jim Radabaugh strolled up to the Bazaar to tell V. R. Kite this interesting news.
Wint met Amos at the train, and Amos shook him by the hand and looked him in the eye and nodded with good-natured approval. “Coming home for supper?” he asked.
“Surely. I wouldn’t miss Maria’s supper.”
“You might say you wouldn’t miss us, too,” Agnes reminded him, clinging to her father’s arm. “Mightn’t he, dad?”
“Say it, Wint,” Amos suggested. “Only way to have peace in the family.”
So they let Agnes have her way, and she made the most of it. Peter Gergue came for supper, too; and Agnes sat at one end of the table, presiding over the coffee urn with a pretty assumption of the rôle of matron. She did most of the talking. The men were too busy with Maria’s fried chicken. But afterward, when they were done, Amos and Peter and Wint went into the sitting room, and Agnes said she wasn’t going to sit and listen to them talk politics. She was going to the moving-picture show. Amos told her to run along. He and Peter shaved their plugs of tobacco, and crumbled the slices, and filled their pipes; and Wint grinned at the exactness with which Peter copied Amos’s procedure. He had filled his own pipe in more conventional fashion, from his pouch, and was smoking while they were still rubbing the sliced tobacco between their palms.
When the pipes were all going, Amos, as was his custom, sat in silence, waiting for some one else to speak first. Wint imitated him. And Gergue, who did not like silences, said at last: