All the week that man Amassa P. Wiggamore had been hanging around town. As I said, he was the first man we saw when we got off the train from Bostwick. He didn’t come near us, though, but he spent a heap of time talking to folks, and Mark said he saw him coming out of the bank two or three times. Then we heard a rumor that the Power Company had bought up a lot of land up above town a few miles—farms that bordered on the river along the bluffs—and that it was planning to have a big storage reservoir there four or five miles long and a couple of miles wide, a regular lake. It was going to store water there during the spring freshets and the rainy season and then let it run down the river when the dry months come along and the river wasn’t anything but a trickle. It was to give an even flow of water the whole year around so he would have it to turn his turbine water-wheels and manufacture electricity.
“Um!” says Mark. “Looks to me like he was figurin’ on that l-l-lake comin’ about to us. L-looks like he was plannin’ to have his big dam right where our dam is.”
“How kin he?” says I.
“He can’t,” says Mark, and his jaw set so you would have thought he was biting something. “He can’t unless he pays our price for this mill.”
“If he can’t git this place, where else kin he build his dam?”
“I don’t know,” says Mark, “b-b-but I’m goin’ to f-f-find out.”
I didn’t feel very comfortable in my mind the rest of that day, thinking about what was going to happen to me at night, but all the same I was going to go through with it, and I says to myself that if any kid got too fresh when I was parading, I’d have something to say to him the next time I caught him. I hain’t much for fighting, but, all the same, I hain’t the kind to put up with more than I can stand. A good-natured fellow ought to fight about once a year just to show folks he hain’t too good-natured.
That night I waited till half past seven, and then I sneaked sister’s baby-cab and down-town I went. The band was just coming out of the Firemen’s Hall and forming a circle in the square when I got there. Mark and Tallow and Binney were sitting on the railing of the town pump, waiting, and I trundled past them without so much as looking. I pretended I didn’t see them at all, and pushed the cab right around the band. For a while nobody noticed me because the band was trying to get up steam. That’s the kind of a band we have.
Our band is what you could call home made. The cornet-player had some lessons, so they made him leader, but the rest of the fellows just bought horns and went out back of the barn where nobody could heave things at them, and learned. My! when they was learning but Wicksville was an unhealthy place early in the morning and at night. Everywhere you turned there was a fellow sitting with his eyes shut and his cheeks puffed out, trying to make a noise on a barytone or an alto or a trombone. Mostly for the first week they couldn’t make any noise at all, except now and then by accident, and that noise would be the worst kind of a blatt you ever heard. It got so bad, after a while, that the Town Board give orders nobody should practise on a horn in the corporate limits before five in the morning and after nine at night.
After a while most of them got so they could make different kinds of noises, but I dunno’s any of ’em ever got so’s they could tell ahead of time just what kind of a noise was coming out. The fellow with the big bass horn could go umph-ha, umph-ha, umph-ha over and over, but mostly it was the same umph-ha. He didn’t seem able to make different kinds. So, no matter what tune they was playing, he would go umph-haing along regardless. The altos had a kind of an easy time because there were four of them, and they sort of picked over their tunes. Each fellow found a note he could play and stuck to it, so that between them they got most of the notes in. Of that crowd—the altos—Deputy-Sheriff Whoppleham was about the best. He was tall and skinny, with a hooked beak and an Adam’s apple bigger than a Northern Spy. When he tooted his Adam’s apple woggled up and down like an elevator. He went at his horn like he planned to eat it. First he would lean his head ’way back and then tilt it sideways and shut one eye. Then he’d let her go. After every note he’d shut the eye he had open and open the eye he had shut. Sort of kept time that way, I guess.