He stood whip in hand, his fur cap pulled over his ears, his eyes fixed on mine, noting the effect of the shot. Every other eye in the room was similarly occupied.
I had no desire to walk to Bingville in the cold. I felt, too, the necessity of proving myself up to the customary village standard in courage and complacency.
"That don't worry me a bit, my friend. There are a good many of us out of jail that ought to be in, and a good many in that ought to be out." I said this calmly, like a man of wide experience and knowledge of the world, one who had traveled extensively, and whose knowledge of convicts and other shady characters was consequently large and varied. The prehistoric age of this epigram was apparently unnoticed by the driver, for he started forward, grasped my hand, and blurted out in a whole-souled, hearty way, strangely in contrast with his former manner:—
"You ain't so gol-darned stuck up, be ye? Yes, I'll take ye, and glad to." Then he stooped over and laid his hand on my shoulder and said in a softened voice: "When ye git 'longside o' Dick you tell him that; it'll please him," and he stalked out and shut the door behind him.
Another dead silence fell upon the group. Then a citizen on the other side of the stove, by the aid of his elbows, lifted himself perpendicularly, unhooked a coat from a peg, and remarked to himself in a tone that expressed supreme disgust:—
"Please him! In a pig's eye it will," and disappeared into the night.
Only two loungers were now left—the butternut man with the sinister expression, and the red-faced man with the dyed mustache.
The landlord for the second time dropped into a chair beside me.
"I knowed Dick was out, but I didn't say nothing, so many of these fellers 'round here is down on him. The night his time was up Dick come in here on his way home and asked after his mother. He hadn't heard from her for a month, and was nigh worried to death about her. I told him she was all right, and had him in to dinner. He'd fleshed up a bit and nobody didn't catch on who he was,—bein' away nigh five years,—and so I passed him off for a drummer."
At this the red-faced man who had been tilted back, his feet on the iron rod encircling the stove, brought them down with a bang, stretched his arms above his head, and said with a yawn, addressing the pots of geraniums on the window sill, "Them as likes jail-birds can have jail-birds," and lounged out of the room, followed by the citizen in butternut. It was apparent that the supper hour of the group had arrived. It was equally evident that the hospitality of the fireside did not extend to the table.