“Well, what if they have? They know enough to get down out of the sun. Come in here, ’Quar’us, with us. I can hear what few brains you’ve got sizzlin’ like a pan o’ tomcod a-fryin’!”
“Over the hills! Crows a-flyin’ and crows a-watch-in’! Hard times comin’, that’s what I guess.”
“I s’pose there’s really a name for that—that—well, the sense for knowin’ that somethin’ is comin’ in the weather line or mebbe the line o’ trouble,” pursued Amazeen, puffing meditatively. It was a placid afternoon for quiet and contemplative discourse of this sort.
Little breezes wavered along the shady side of Brickett’s store and stirred the grasses. Other breezes skylarked through the wide-open front doors of the store and came out at the side door near the old men. Inside the store the breezes did what the people of Palermo usually did when they visited Brickett’s emporium—they swapped commodities. The breezes brought their little treasures of pure, salty fragrance from the cove and took away queer little whiffs of spices that were stacked in wooden boxes, sickish-sweet scents from the tobacco “figs,” aroma of coffee and tea, flavourings from the candy show case and more pungent odours of kerosene and dried herring.
“Now a dog,” stated Amazeen, “don’t really have no common sense like human bein’s, but then a dog knows when any one’s goin’ to die in a neighbourhood, and don’t he git out front o’ the house and stick his nose straight up in the air and lally-hoo till some one kicks him gallywest? That’s a sense of knowin’ ahead o’ time, and he’s born with it—and that’s somethin’ how ’tis with ’Quar’us. Them as says he’s just loony ain’t watched him same’s I have.”
The old man on the platform had shifted his legs again. The breeze fluttered his long hair and the sun was stealing the last of the original colour from his yellowed garments. The men in the shade were silent, partly from slumbrous laziness, partly because their slow minds were once again revolving one of their stock problems: What mysterious faculty of divination did “Hard-Times” Wharff possess?
“There ain’t no disputin’ that he’s foretold full a dozen line gales that was comin’ to rip the stuffin’ out o’ things ’long the coast,” said Brickett. “That much we all know! Time the school-house was burned down he had it all predicted out—leastways, he told ’round that the critter with red tongue and crackling teeth and all out doors for a gizzard was comin’ towards our village—and that’s a fire, ain’t it? He’s seen shrouds in candles for fifty fam’lies in P’lermo, I’ll bet you, just come to count ’em up! There’s somethin’—somethin’—‘lectricity—or hypnotickism, or somethin’! These scientists will git it figured out some day!”
They all pondered in silence, the hush of the sultry afternoon drowsily brooding. In the store shed a stub-tailed horse dozed uneasily between the thills of Dow Babb’s beach waggon, occasionally thudding his hoof in the soft soil, trying to dislodge the clustering flies. Somewhere in the maple tree the cicada whirred in long, shrill diminuendo.
“I ain’t no sp’tu’list or nothin’ of that sort,” broke out Uncle Buck. “And I don’t b’lieve in no sech things like you’re talkin’ about, nor that any Wharff that ever lived was anything except cracked—like that old one-legged her’n out there,” he added, directing an eye of disfavour on Aquarius. “I tell you if they could cast mists in the old times, then why can’t they do it now, when everything is so much improved—-telefoams and telegraphts and ’lectric cars and all that? Any man that ever claimed to see a rooster haul off a log was a dum liar if he said so.”
Dow Babb flipped his legs together indignantly.