As Lloyd stood in the door of the drug store in the light which streamed through the great red and green glass bottles in the windows, that bespoke its functions, he listened to the snickering comments of the men on the sidewalk while they recited to newcomers the details of the incident, and his mind laid hold of certain unexplained points which were most pertinent to its proper comprehension.
"Why, I thought that Colbury was a dry town," he addressed one of the bystanders. "Where do all these drunken men get their liquor?"
"I dunno—do you?" His interlocutor favoured him with a facetious wink which was in the nature of things an equivocal demonstration, for as he faced the light of the drug store windows the wink was both red and green.
"Well, the liquor must be pretty cheap to be drunk in such glorious plenty," Lloyd remarked impersonally.
For the crowd was of a grade that has little money to spend, and it would seem that the Fair must needs absorb a good part of it.
"Liquor is cheap!—you bet your life," his interlocutor treated him to another rainbow-tinted wink, "liquor is cheap,—for Shadrach Pinnott is in town!"
The simple words explained many things to Lloyd's quick perceptions—the waggon laden with baskets to sell, the secluded camping-ground on the river-bank, yet near the town, which was a virtuous dry town with not a saloon open in the place. This surreptitious sale of liquor was doubtless illegal in more than one sense, evading the tax of the revenue law of the government as well as defying the restrictions of the municipal prohibition. He was remembering the occasion of his arrival on the mountain—how the girl had followed him to the house as if she feared his escape; how, despite the torrents of rain, she had sought her father and brothers to submit to their judgment the mystery of his sudden appearance; how eagerly anxious was the old beldame in volunteering to account for their vocation and the use to which they put the product of their great orchards; how obviously relieved they had seemed when they had learned his own vocation. It was all plain, now; they were distillers of illicit whisky and brandy, and they had suspected him as an emissary of the revenue department, a detective, or one of the marshal's men. It was not an unnatural conclusion, perhaps; strangers in those secluded fastnesses, unheralded and without vouchers, were rare and obnoxious to suspicion.
The matter was peculiarly distasteful to Lloyd individually, who was a sober, law-abiding citizen, and in the interests of the Street Fair, specially repugnant. He resented the fact that the enterprising moonshiners should contrive to utilise the presence of his show in the streets of Colbury to share the profits of the occasion with their nefarious and illicit trade. Absurdly enough in view of its humble insignificance Lloyd was proud of his Fair—it was a clean show, he averred; it had no disreputable hangers-on nor traffic; its members worked faithfully for their scanty wages; it lived up to its representations, barring of course the few illusions and devices necessary to heighten amusement. It tolerated no false dealing on the part of its concessionaries toward the unsophisticated and simple population; it was a strictly temperance organisation—the acrobats required sobriety to conserve the control of the nerves, and the other members of the company, hard at work from early morn till late at night, had neither time nor inclination to indulge in the flowing bowl. Lloyd was nettled, even more, troubled, that it should be associated in any way with the risky trade plying on the outskirts of the town. The sudden presence of numbers of intoxicated men could be accounted for by the authorities in no way but by the suspicion of the sly sale of liquor in the Fair itself, or by some surreptitious vendor disconnected with its management. This elusive law-breaker would be difficult to discover, even though he bore the reputation of previous exploits of the kind; the sale of the home-made baskets was a very efficient blind; the spot which the moonshiner had selected was invaluable for his purposes, so secluded, so close to the bank—a sudden alarm and the chaste sylvan waters of the crystal river would be adulterated in a wise never known before, the land flowing with toddy, in lieu of the conventional milk and honey. Lloyd winced as he reflected that he, the manager of the Carnival, had been seen to repair to this spot this afternoon, that he had earlier visited the moonshiners' house, and apparently given them their first intimation that they should attend the Street Fair.
As he still stood on the street corner, looking about mechanically, his hat drawn down over his brow, his hands in his pockets, he was lost in thought and saw naught of the scene before him—the torches in front of the stands of confectionery and the peanut roaster; the electric stars that studded the circumference of the Ferris Wheel; the big mooney lustre of the rows of tents, the flare within illumining the outer aspect of the canvas; the courthouse rising up in the midst, taking on a sort of castellated dignity as its tower loomed in the dim light of uncertainty above; the motley crowd surging hither and thither wherever a sudden commotion gave promise of special attraction or the added sensation of an accident; the straggling glimmer from the lighted windows of the residences of the town along the hillside; and further away the contour of august mountain ranges under the melancholy light of a young moon, little more than a gilded sickle cutting the mists, like the test of the temper of the scimitar of the Orient dividing the gauze veil at a single stroke. He heard naught of the varied clamours of the town—the callow vociferations of the ever-present small boy, the clatter of tongues in conversation and comment, the sudden brazen outpour of tumult when the brass band sent a popular melody pulsing along the currents of the air, the frantic cries of the spielers contending against each other and vaunting their rival attractions. Great favourites these were with the country crowd, and it was a facile laugh that rewarded their pleasantries. Sometimes these verged on hardihood. "Isaac! Isaac! he eats 'em—he eats 'em alive! Come in! Come in, an' see the snake-eater, lady—he eats 'em alive!" Then resounded his rival, "Oh, lady, don't go down there. Come in here and see the Fat Lady—weighs six hundred pounds."
And anon the retort, "Oh, lady, that feller ain't got no fat woman—none but skin-and-bone would look at him. Here's Isaac—worth the money; he eats 'em—he eats 'em, alive."