“Then it ain’t no wife in your case?” pursued Peak, suspiciously.
“I tell ye, all I can do now is to hint,” insisted Hiram, evading the main question. “I’ve jest got her on the anxious seat. It’s the way I struck up her interest first of all. I couldn’t have got near her with a ten-foot pole if I hadn’t got her curiosity started by hints. Then, of course, she wanted to know what I meant and I’ve been puttin’ her off ever since. You never saw a woman so worked up as she is, Sime—never. She can’t hardly stand it till I come again. Then she lets into me to tell her all about Cap Bodfish. She don’t want to leave go of him till she knows definite. I reckon she wants to have him around so as to peel him when she does find out that there really is something in what I hint.” The showman chuckled again. “And it’s kind of what you might call a lingerin’ death for him—one of the slow kind like bein’ gnawed by ants. Ev’ry time he goes up to see her she don’t know whuther to love him or club him off’n the premises—and she blows hot and she blows cold all in one minit, and if he ain’t the wust puzzled man that ever tried to box compass in the sea of matrimony, then I’ll eat the celluloid peel in a side-show lemonade.”
“Don’t he suspect what it all means?” inquired Peak, beginning to appreciate the situation with the malice of a man who has been fooled and enjoys seeing others in the same boat.
“Keeps a-grabbin’ ev’ry which way like a man that hears a moskeeter buzzin’ round him in the night,” giggled Hiram. “I’ve set right in the other room sev’ral times and he didn’t know I was there, and I’ve heard him coax and beg and guess and promise and almost blubber, and me behind the door in t’other room swellin’ up and swellin’ up and then lettin’ it out through my nose easy, and then swellin’ up again. I don’t believe I shall be able to stand very much of that. I’m li’ble to bust some time.”
“I should think it would be well wuth list’nin’ to,” agreed Peak. Then he said artlessly: “I like fun myself. Why can’t I go along with you after this? Then there won’t be no such thing as her gettin’ her cobweb around you.”
“You talk as though I was runnin’ matinées up-country,” said Hiram, the red on his bristly cheeks. He detected Peak’s selfish apprehension, and the giant’s gaze shifted under his scowl. “I never had any trouble in runnin’ my own bus’ness yet and I don’t expect to have to call in understudies right away.”
In considerable dudgeon he marched along to a narrow secretary in the corner and began to mumble figures in an undertone as he went over his accounts. Peak sat gazing into the fire, twirling his huge thumbs thoughtfully.
The sound of some one stamping off snow on the porch broke upon the silence of the two. The visitor came in without knocking and, fumbling his way along the dark entry, opened the sitting-room door.
It was old Sumner Badger, the wet snow splotching his faded overcoat.
“’Pears to be one o’ these ’ere sticky storms,” he observed amiably, pulling a chair up before the stove.