In this world much sin is forgiven an entertaining personality.
There was always a feeling of incompleteness on the store platform when Rat was absent, that nobody ever admitted, but when he arrived and took his accustomed seat on the green wheel barrow, that was part of the merchandise that Posey kept outside in the day time, the depressing vacancy existed no longer.
Bill Stiles’s temperamental discharges of ornate philosophy, and his comments on life’s ironies and human folly, required a target, and this was commonly the role assigned to Rat Hyatt.
“I’m always the goat,” remarked Rat one hot afternoon, as we sat in the shade of the wooden awning. “W’y don’t you pick on somebody that likes to listen? I’ve been kidded by experts, an’ this long talk o’ your’n seems kind o’ mixed up. The trouble with you an’ a lot o’ the other ol’ mud birds ’round ’ere, is you open yer mouth an’ go ’way an’ leave it, an’ fergit you started it.”
“Now look ’ere, Rat,” replied Bill, “you aint got no call to talk back to me. W’en I’m talkin’ to you, I aint arguin’. I’m tellin’ you how ’tis. I knowed you w’en you wasn’t knee high to a duck, an’ you aint got brains enough to have the headache with.
“That feller that you sold my dog to the last time was ’ere yisterd’y askin’ ’bout you, an’ if Spot ’ad ever come back. He’d been up to your place, an’ its a good thing fer you that you an’ Spot was off some’rs in the woods. He told me what ’e traded you fer the animal, an’ I want you to bring them things to me, fer it was my dog you got ’em with.”
As Spot was asleep under the wheelbarrow, Bill’s equity in the repeating rifle and cartridges, that Hyatt had received in exchange for him, seemed rather hazy. The reason for Spot’s prolonged absence some months before was now apparent to Bill, and, although the intelligent animal had returned home, as expected, after being traded off, the old man’s nurtured wrath was waiting for Rat when he arrived that afternoon. Hyatt seemed in nowise abashed at the revelation of Bill’s knowledge of his shady transaction with the trapper.
“Muskrat” Hyatt
“If I hadn’t a knowed the dog ’ud come home, I wouldn’t a let ’im go. It showed how much I trusted ’im w’en I let ’im go off with a stranger like that. If that feller thought ’e c’d keep a fine dog like that away from them that loved ’im, ’e oughta suffer fer ’is foolishness, an’ leave sump’n in the country to be remembered by. Of course if sump’n ’ad a happened to Spot, an’ ’e hadn’t a come back, I’d a given you the rifle, but I knowed that dog was all right. You c’n have ’im back any time you want ’im, if he’ll stay with you, but you hadn’t oughta jump on me as long as ’e aint lost, an’ ’e’s in first class health.”