"That," Shinn retorted, "would be till nex' election, but she won't stay that long. Sence you're so stiff about it, Glaves, let me tell you that you kain't fly in the face of this settlement. You may be big wolf, but there's others in the pack. If she's here at the end of the month—there'll be something doing." Nodding evilly, he drove on, leaving the trustee to puzzle over his meaning as he shaped and polished the crooks.
"Bluffing, I reckon," he concluded, and that, also, was the opinion of Flynn, to whom he carried his doubts that evening.
"There'll be no way for thim spalpeens to fire us av the boord?" Flynn queried. "No? Phwat about an opposhition school?"
"Agin the law to build one in this township."
"Thin 'tis all out av the big mouth av Shinn. Thalk, an' nothing more."
Both were confirmed in their opinion when the month drew to a peaceful, if hot, end. Tricked out in various green, woods and prairies slumbered or sighed restlessly under torrid heat that extracted their essential essences, weighting the heavy air with intense odors of curing grasses. There was nothing to indicate that the virulent tide of spleen was ready to burst its banks. Knowing that another week would bring on haying, with its attendant wars to provide an outlet for feeling, neither trustee anticipated the event which occurred at the full of the moon.
Though the storm broke around Glaves's cabin, Flynn received immediate notice. In pleasant weather he and his wife would sit on their doorstep after the children were in bed, to enjoy the quiet hour while the peace and cool charmed away the cares of the day; and this night was particularly beautiful. Over dewlit plains the moon emptied a flood of silver and polished the slough beyond the dooryard till it shone like burnished steel. Rolling off and away under that tender light, the huge earth waves seemed to heave, swell, sigh as a lover's bosom under the sweet eyes of his mistress, while from the corrals near by issued the heavy breathing of contented kine. Always music in the ears of a farmer, it stimulated Flynn, set him planning for the future; but he had hardly touched on next year's increase before Mrs. Flynn seized his arm.
"Phwat's that?"
At first Flynn thought that Glaves was "dogging" stray cattle away from his grain-fields, but when the iron note of beaten pans, gunshots, metallic thundering were added to the first clash of cow-bells, he sprang up. "A charivari! At Glaves's! A spite charivari!"
"Oh, my God, Flynn!" his wife exclaimed. "That poor girl!" She knew what that orgy of sound portended. A jest at weddings, the charivari was sometimes used as a sinister weapon to express communal dislike or punish suspicion of sin. The most terrible memory of her girlhood was associated with a party of fiercely moral backwoodsmen that flogged a man at her father's wagon-tail and dragged a woman, who had offended public morals, naked and screaming through a field of thistles. In Silver Creek were men who had participated in that cruelty, forced to emigrate to escape the law. Small wonder that she agonized under the thought. "Flynn! Flynn, man! Hurry, get your horse!"