“Cause enough, Mack.... I’ll be going back to the city to-morrow. I hate to leave you to the wiles of the menagerie, for if I ain’t terrible mistook they’re out for your blood, and they think they’ve got a whiff of it. But I cal’late they’ve got their ropes crossed. They’ve got the idea they’re h’isting the mains’l, but it ain’t nothing but the spanker. If I was going to stay aboard I’d give ’em a few lessons the next few days that they’d not forget all the rest of their lives.”
“You’re certainly mixing your figures in great shape this morning,” commented the minister good-naturedly.
“Well, if mixing figures is like mixing drinks, making ’em more elevating to the thoughts, I cal’late I’d best do a little more mixing. There’s going to be a squall right soon that’ll test the ribs of the old salvation 249 ark to the cracking p’int. If I was you I’d furl my sails a mite, and stand by, Mack.”
“We’re so accustomed to trouble now that–––”
“Trouble? This is going to be hell, that is, unless luck or Providence takes a hand and steers her through. Your Elder thinks he’s on the home stretch to winning his laurels, but if I was going to hang round here he’d wake up right sudden one of these fine mornings to find his wreath missing.”
“Josiah, you’re as wicked as you can be this morning. What on earth has come over you?” exclaimed Miss Pipkin with deep concern.
“You’d feel wicked, too, if you was dealing with that kind. But that there Elder puts me in mind of a tramp printer that come to work for Adoniah one time. Adoniah was a brother of mine,” he explained in answer to a quizzing look from the minister. “Adoniah was managing a country paper down the line then, and being short on help he took this tramp printer on. He gave him something to set up that the editor had writ,––you 250 couldn’t tell one of the letters of that editor from t’other, hardly,––and that feller had a time with it. The piece was about some chap that was running for office, and it closed up with something like this: ‘Dennis, my boy, look well to your laurels.’ When that tramp got through with it, it come back to the editor like this: ‘Dammit, my boy, bark well at your barrels.’”
Mr. McGowan laughed heartily, and Miss Pipkin struggled against a like inclination, doing her best to appear shocked.
“Josiah Pott!” she said at last. “I’d think you’d be ashamed telling such things!”
“It ain’t nothing more than what Adoniah told, and it happened just as I spun it. You used to think what Adoniah said was all right.”