“Indeed, Mr. Sharp is a fine Christian gentleman.�
“Do yez call the likes of old Jake Sharp, the slave-driver, a fine Christian gentleman? A liar, a thief, and a murderer is what he is.�
Good Deacon Surface was shocked.
“Those are pretty hard names to apply to a neighbor, Mr. Moriarty. I think you would find it very difficult to prove that Mr. Sharp is what you call him.�
“Indade I would not,� replied the indignant son of Erin. “A liar? Did he ever pay a man the wages he agreed to? Not if he could help it. Didn’t young Mike Silk knock him down flat in his tracks before Old Sharp could remember that he promised to pay him two dollars a day in haying? He remembered it all right after Mike flattened him. Oh, it’s a bad memory he has, all right.
“A thief? Sure it’s yourself he was after st’aling a shovel from. And sure it’s your own memory needs bracing up, too. It’s your own shovel he was st’aling, whittling off your name and branding on his own with a red-hot iron. Forgot all about it, have yez? Do yez forget the time when he stole his own daughter’s money, that he was guardian for, and lost it, and the poor girl was nigh going crazy over it? It’s surely a poor memory ye has, Deacon Surface.
“A murderer? I haven’t forgotten the day when he hurried young Pat Flynn in the hay-field till the poor fellow dropped dead by the side of me with sun-stroke. I niver shall forget it in this world. And when David Baldwin, the Congressman, asked Sharp why did he hurry the lad such a hot day, wasn’t the old villain after saying it was liquor that killed him? And the poor lad never tasted liquor. If that wasn’t murder, what would yez call it? An awful poor memory yez have, all at once, Deacon Surface.
“And ye’ve forgot, too, how old Sharp sold the dis’ased meat in the city, haven’t yez? Ye’ve forgot intirely how two children were killed by that same meat, so the doctors said? And that is what yez call a fine Christian gentleman in the First Church, is it?�
“But the meat charge was never proved,� protested Deacon Surface.
“And it’s yerself knows as well as anybody why it wasn’t proved—because Zach Baldwin wanted it hushed up. It can be proved to-day if John Wycliff and meself, and one other man I could name, were called as witnesses.�