“You’ve got a Chinaman’s chance,” Lutcher told him scornfully. “Why, I’ve given that pup his pap for two years. I’m not going to stand for this. Not for a minute. You tell him so.”
“If you’d rather have it so,” Jim said mildly, “I’ll pour it all out of the window, right now.” He said this mildly, but Lutcher knew Jim’s mildness was apt to be deceptive. In the end, he surrendered to the inevitable, because it was the inevitable. Jim placed his seals, and strolled away. Lutcher boiled out after him and hurried off to see V. R. Kite.
The marshal bent his steps toward the Weaver House, that infamous hostelry where Wint had spent the night of his election, and where he had been found next day. Radabaugh knew Mrs. Moody, the presiding genius of that place, as well as he knew Lutcher. He had always made it his business to know such folk. But Mrs. Moody did not receive him with the good nature Lutcher had shown. She had heard some rumors of what was to come.
The sunken office of the old hotel was little changed, when the marshal strolled in, since that night of Wint’s election. The light of day, fighting its way through the dingy windows, served only to make the interior more squalid. The same old men played their interminable game of checkers on the table in the corner. The miserable dog that bore Marshal Jim Radabaugh’s name sprawled beneath the table, its bony legs clattering on the floor when the creature stirred in its sleep. The boy, that boy who had been so painfully reading the literature of brewing on the night of the election, was not to be seen. It is to be hoped that he was out about some wholesome play. Radabaugh had a suspicion, founded on experience, that the boy was not in school. He never was. Mrs. Moody sat behind the high, bar-like counter. When Radabaugh came in, she got up with a quick, deadly movement like the stir of a coiling snake; and she smiled at the marshal with those hideously beautiful false teeth gleaming in her aged and distorted countenance.
“Why, good morning, deary,” she said, terribly amiable. “I don’t often see you down here any more.”
“Morning, Mrs. Moody,” said Jim. And stalked past the counter toward the door that led to that back room which overhung the creek. Mrs. Moody bustled after him and caught his arm at the door.
“Where you a-going, Jim Radabaugh?” she demanded. “You say what you want, and say it here.”
Radabaugh shook his head. He knew such measures as he had used with Lutcher would not serve with Mrs. Moody. The patrons of the Weaver House had little respect for such flimsy things as seals. He knew, also, that there was no possibility of relying upon the word of Mrs. Moody. Many women, especially such women as she, have the attitude toward promises that the Kaiser had toward treaties. They consider them interesting only when broken. Radabaugh meant to destroy her stock of liquor; and he told her so.
Then she began to scream at him. The old men at the checkerboard brushed at their ears as though her screaming were a swarm of flies, harassing them. Jim pushed her to one side and went through to the back room. When he set about his business there, she attacked him with a billet of wood; and Jim subdued the old warrior as gently as might be, and told her to mind what she did. So she began to weep and wail and scream hysterically; and Jim emptied bottles through the trap-door into the creek, knocking off the neck of each bottle so that there might be no survivors. All the while, Mrs. Moody wailed behind him.
When it was done, he turned to her, brushing his hands. “Orders are, no more selling, ma’am,” he said gently. “If you start up again, I’ll have to take you in.”