“See here, Sime,” he began, lighting a cigar to keep himself in countenance, “you have figgered the thing all wrong. You know I ain’t a marryin’ man. You and me neither of us is. I want you to live with me and you’re goin’ to.”
“I should think that the both of us has suffered enough from women as it is,” grumbled the giant. “Both of us knows the other’s troubles with ’em. And now for you to go and ram yourself right into the bramble-bush again, and me here to advise you, makes me mad and disgusted. I’m thinkin’ of you first of all, Hime. I ain’t selfish. But I can see jest how it’s goin’ to be: you’re goin’ to git hitched and then the first thing she’ll do will be to put the spittoon in the woodshed and kick me out-doors. I thought you knowed more than to do it—I honest thought so.”
Peak bowed his head in grief.
“In my whole life long I never was judged right yet by any human bein’,” wailed Hiram. “And now here you go off the handle jest like the rest. You know what Nymp’ Bodfish done to me. You know what I propose to do to Nymp’ Bodfish. That’s all there is to it. He wants her and the twenty thousand, and he’d ’a’ had her a year ago if he wasn’t hangin’ off about bein’ a farmer. He wants her to sell and put the money into a schooner, and he’s jest as much reckonin’ on that as on flood tide when the moon’s right. His heart is set on it. I’m goin’ to make him the sickest man ’tween here and the North Pole.”
“There was a man once that give an elephant a chaw of terbacker,” related Simon, “and when the doctors was tryin’ to fit some of the least mussed-up pieces together at the hospital, he opened his eyes and said: ‘It was a good one on the elephant, wasn’t it?’ and then give one hiccup and died.”
“If you was only jest—well, say, ‘Figger-Four,’ and made such talk to me,” snarled Hiram, “I’d drive you right down through the floor there, like I’d drive a tent peg. But I’m willin’ to argue with you, Sime, and if that don’t show that I’m a friend of yours, then I don’t know what does.” He wiped his flushed face. “You understand, I can’t bust this thing in a minit.”
“Didn’t you yourself ketch him right in a caper that would queer him with any decent woman—lug-gin’ off another man’s wife ’cause he was hired to?”
“Don’t you know that would be givin’ away the trouble of the young Mayos—and them livin’ together now like turtledoves?” roared Hiram. “Look at my brother Phin—one of God’s own gentlemen, if there ever was one. Him a-breakin’ his heart and misjudged and old Willard’s girl passin’ him by be-. cause he smashed King Bradish before her face and eyes—and Bradish with the last word to her! Don’t you suppose my brother could square himself with her by just one word of what he knows? But will he do it after he has passed ’Rissy Mayo his word that so long as she behaves herself he won’t give her away to any livin’ soul? You can say he’s a fool if you want to, but I tell ye, Sime, when a man has got as far along in life as Phin has without breakin’ his solemn word, you can’t blame him if he’d rather gnaw himself inside than have those whom he gives away scorch him outside.”
He had furiously puffed his cigar down to the end. Now he lighted another.
“I never approved of him carin’ a snap for the Willard girl, Sime. I don’t like her. I don’t like the breed. But this lovin’ of folks ain’t to be regulated jest the way you’d like to have it. If my brother can keep his mouth shut about King Bradish’s rottenness when, as you might say, it’s a wife at stake for him, then I guess I can keep still when it’s only a grudge that I’m workin’.”