"Alonzo shut him off. 'How dare you drag a lady's name into a barroom brawl?' says he.
"'Don't shoot in here,' says Ben. 'You'd scare the ladies.'
"Wilfred went pasty, indeed, thinking his host was going to gun him.
"'Oh, very well, I won't then,' says Alonzo. 'I guess I can be a gentleman when necessary. But all joking aside, I want to ask him this: Does he consider poetry to be an accomplishment or a vice?'
"'I was going to put something like that to him myself, only I couldn't think of it,' says Doc Martingale, edging up and looking quite restrained and nervous in the arms. I was afraid of the doc. I was afraid he was going to blemish Wilfred a couple of times right there.
"'An accomplishment or a vice? Answer yes or no!' orders the judge in a hard voice.
"The poet looks round at 'em and attempts to laugh merrily, but he only does it from the teeth out.
"'Laugh on, my proud beauty!' says Ben Button. Then he turns to the bunch. 'What we really ought to do,' he says, 'we ought to make a believer of him right here and now.'
"Even then, mind you, the husbands would have lost their nerve if Ben hadn't took the lead. Ben didn't have to live with their wives so what cared he? Wilfred Lennox sort of shuffled his feet and smiled a smile of pure anxiety. He knew some way that this was nothing to cheer about.
"'I got it,' says Jeff Tuttle with the air of a thinker. 'We're cramping the poor cuss here. What he wants is the open road.'