"Then I wish you'd p'int it out," said Buckalew, "if you've got either."
"By the Almighty, Squire"—Mr. Arp turned in his chair with sudden heat—"if I'd lived as long as you—"
"You have," interrupted the other, stung. "Twelve years ago!"
"If I'd lived as long as you," Mr. Arp repeated, unwincingly, in a louder voice, "and had follered Satan's trail as long as you have, and yet couldn't recognize it when I see it, I'd git converted and vote Prohibitionist."
"I don't see it," interjected Uncle Joe Davey, in his querulous voice. (He was the patriarch of them all.) "I can't find no cloven-hoof-prints in the snow."
"All over it, sir!" cried the cynic. "All over it! Old Satan loves tricks like this. Here's a town that's jest one squirmin' mass of lies and envy and vice and wickedness and corruption—"
"Hold on!" exclaimed Colonel Flitcroft. "That's a slander upon our hearths and our government. Why, when I was in the Council—"
"It wasn't a bit worse then," Mr. Arp returned, unreasonably. "Jest you look how the devil fools us. He drops down this here virgin mantle on Canaan and makes it look as good as you pretend you think it is: as good as the Sunday-school room of a country church—though THAT"—he went off on a tangent, venomously—"is generally only another whited sepulchre, and the superintendent's mighty apt to have a bottle of whiskey hid behind the organ, and—"
"Look here, Eskew," said Jonas Tabor, "that's got nothin' to do with—"
"Why ain't it? Answer me!" cried Mr. Arp, continuing, without pause: "Why ain't it? Can't you wait till I git through? You listen to me, and when I'm ready I'll listen to—"