The woman of the house promptly appeared at the door when the van swung into the yard.
“Well, it’s best for you that you did stop on your way back,” she snapped. “You never paid a single mite of attention to me when you went past this morning, but kept goin’ like the mill-tail of Tophet. I said to my husband that peddlers’ teams was gettin’ pretty stuck up, prancin’ past with four horses and not payin’ no attention when, a lady comes to the door sacking a bag of rags. Now here they be. Have you got your st’ilyards? I suppose you have and that you cheat as much as——”
“That woman seems to be the open-faced, self-windin’ kind,” Hiram growled to Peak through the corner of his mouth. Then he interrupted her.
“You’d better buy a good pair of far-sighted specs from the next peddler that comes along this way, marm,” he suggested with some insolence. “You’ll be able to tell the diff’rence, then, between a tin rag peddler or a rag tin peddler, or whatever you call ’em, and two gentlemen ridin’ out for pleasure to take the air. Now, to come to bus’ness—will you sell me a baitin’ for my horses, and three lunches—two to be et on the spot and one to be took away?”
Her first impulse, evidently, was to refuse this blunt request. But Hiram waved a bill at her. She called a freckled youth from the barn and continued to stare at the vehicle and the two strangers.
When the boy led away the horses, after Hiram and Peak had unhooked them from the cart, the woman broke her silence and there was suppressed excitement in her tones.
“I’ve got you placed. You’re the circus man that’s come back to live down to P’lermo, and this is one of your carts, and you’ve come up here to help catch that dratted el’phunt that’s been rampagin’ ’round here since noon. You ain’t come none too soon, Mr. Circuser. You’ll have a nice bill to pay in this neighbourhood—and you can start right in by settlin’ with us first of all. You come here, the two of ye.”
In silent amazement the men followed her around the ell.
“There’s where he come through,” she rasped, pointing to two lengths of a picket fence laid flat; “there’s where he went out.” On the opposite side of the garden more lengths of fence were cast down. “Half the pickets busted where he stepped on ’em! Three of our little Sopsyvine trees knocked down, and there—look there!”
She had evidently reserved this climax. She pointed to the slope of a little hillock.