The town was ablaze with the story of the boys' escapade on Wednesday afternoon when Janice came back from Middletown. She stopped at Hopewell Drugg's store, which was a rendezvous for the male gossips of the town, and Walky was holding forth upon the subject uppermost in the public mind:
"Them consarned lettle skeezicks—I'd ha' trounced the hull on 'em if they'd been mine."
"How would you have felt, Mr. Dexter, if they really were yours?" asked
Janice, who had been talking to 'Rill and Nelson Haley. "Suppose Sim
Howell were your boy? How would you feel to know that, at his age, he
had been intoxicated?"
"Jefers-pelters!" grunted Walky. "I reckon I wouldn't git pigeon-breasted with pride over it—nossir!"
"Then don't make fun," admonished the girl, severely. "It is an awful, awful thing that the boys of Polktown can even get hold of such stuff to make them so ill."
"That is right, Miss Janice," Hopewell said, busy with a customer.
"What else, Mrs. Massey?"
"That's all to-day, Hopewell. I hate to give you so big a bill, but that's all I've got," said the druggist's wife, as she handed the store-keeper a twenty-dollar gold certificate.
"He, he!" chuckled Walky, "Guess Massey wants all the change in town in his own till, heh?"
"That is all right, Mrs. Massey," said Hopewell, in his gentle way. "I can change it. Have to give you a gold piece—there."
"What's going to be done about this liquor selling, anyway?" demanded Nelson Haley, in a much more serious mood, it would seem, than usual. "I think Janice has the right of it—although I did not think so at first. 'Live and let live,' is a good motto; but it is foolish to let a mad dog live in a community. Lem Parraday's bar is certainly doing a lot of harm to innocent people."