"Aw, don't go so early, Hopewell. You're your own man, ain't ye?
Don't let this white-haired kid boss you."
"Let him alone, Joe Bodley!" commanded Bowman again, and Janice, shaking on the porch, knew that it must be the barkeeper who had interfered with Hopewell Drugg's escape.
The girl was terror-stricken; but she was indignant, too. She shrank from facing the half-intoxicated crowd in the room just as she would have trembled at the thought of entering a cage of lions.
Nevertheless, she put her hand against the swinging screen, pushed it open, and stepped inside the tavern door.
CHAPTER XIV
A DECLARATION OF WAR
The room was a large apartment with smoke-cured and age-blackened beams in the ceiling. This was the ancient tap-room of the tavern, which had been built at that pre-Revolutionary time when the stuffed catamount, with its fangs and claws bared to the York State officers, crouched on top of the staff at Bennington—for Polktown was one of the oldest settlements in these "Hampshire Grants."
No noisier or more ill-favored crew, Janice Day thought, could ever have been gathered under the roof of the Inn, than she now saw as she pushed open the screen. Tobacco smoke poisoned the air, floating in clouds on a level with the men's heads, and blurring the lamplight.
There was a crowd of men and boys at the door of the dance hall. At the bar was another noisy line. It was evident that Joe Bodley had merely run from behind the bar for a moment to stop, if he could, Hopewell Drugg's departure. Hopewell was flushed, hatless, and trembling. Whether he was intoxicated or ill, the fact remained that he was not himself.
The storekeeper clung with both hands to the neck of his violin. A greasy-looking, black-haired fellow held on to the other end of the instrument, and was laughing in the face of the expostulating Frank Bowman, displaying a wealth of white teeth, and the whites of his eyes, as well. He was a foreigner of some kind. Janice had never seen him before, and she believed he must be the "foxy-looking" man Frank had previously mentioned.