"What are you talking about?" says he, playful in his turn—forced playful, painful to see. He gave me a slap on the back and I let her flicker at that—always willing to take a friend's intentions rather than the results. I never went into friendship as a money-making business.
"I thought I startled you," I said. He laughed loud, so loud that I looked at him and backed away a little. "Startled me!" he says. "What nonsense! When did you come in? How do you like your job? Going to stay long?"
He fired these questions at me as fast as he could talk. I, dumb-struck, answered somehow, while I felt around for something to think with.
He was here and there and all over, doing everything with the same fever-hurry. Popping a string of questions at me and away before I could answer the half of them, as if he couldn't hold his mind to one thing more than a minute—and this was Arthur Saxton!
Part of my mind talked to him, part wrastled with Mary's hints and the other part kept up a wondering why and what, for I felt for that man a whole-hearted kid's worship.
A sack of flour fell from the wagon and split. Instantly Sax broke out into a fit of cursing. I never heard anything like it. He cursed the flour, the man that dropped it, Panama, the business, and everything above and below, his eyes two balls of wild-fire.
The man jumped back scared. Sax's jaws worked hard; he got back an outside appearance of humanity.
"This heat makes me irritable, Bill," he said. "Besides, there's lots of annoyance in a new business."
"Sure," says I. I saw the flour sack was only an excuse—a little hole to let out the strain. A person's wits will outfoot his judgment sometimes. I had no experience to guide me, yet I knew Saxton needed humoring.
I've heard people say that things—like liquor, for instance—couldn't get the best of such and such a man, because he was strong-willed. What kind of argument is that? Suppose he wants to drink. Ain't his strong will going to make him drink just that much harder, and be that much harder to turn back, than a man with a putty spine? The only backbone some men has is what their neighbors think. Them you can handle. But the man that rules himself generally finds it quite different from being the lady boss of an old woman's home. Just because he's fit to rule, he'll rebel, and he'll scrap with himself till they put a stone up, marking the place of a drawn battle. But the neighbors won't know it. They'll envy him the dead easy time he had, or get mad when he does something foolish—loses one heat out of many that the neighbors didn't even dare to run—and gossip over him. "Who'd think a man that's lived as good a life as Mr. Smith would," and so forth. But you can't blame the neighbors neither. Most people reasonably prefer peace to war, and with a man like Sax it's war most of the time. You have to care a heap to stay with him.