“I can’t talk with him,” remonstrated the old man. “There isn’t any sense in him. With him it is either a curse or a blow, and the Willard family has had enough of both from him. I have come to talk with you, Mr. Look. Whatever else I have said to you and of you, I’ll acknowledge that you are a fair man to talk with.”
The lawyer made no reply.
“I’ll say nothing to you of his under-handed tricks to interfere in my business of loans and private banking,” went on Willard, stroking his trembling hand along his withered neck. “But now he is going to mix into town politics with his brass band and his free suppers and free dances and his circus flapdoodle. It’s hurting this town, Lawyer Look, and I appeal to you as a good citizen of Palermo to pull him back and make him behave himself and not bring discredit on the place that I and mine before me have been proud of so long.” There was some dignity as well as earnest appeal in the old man’s voice.
“I understand that he has the hoodlums with him,” he went on. “He can make a lot of trouble in our town meeting this month. We have always got along so well that it will be a shame to bring uproar and contention and cheapness into our town affairs, Mr. Look.”
Delicacy of touch at critical moments was not one of Squire Phineas Look’s attributes. Now he leaned his elbows on the table, locked his fingers together, and bending toward the old man said bluntly:
“What you mean is, that it would be bad for you if you were defeated for town treasurer, after your thirty years of service, since that would mean that your books would be examined.”
He pitied Willard when he crumpled down in his chair. In the silence the lawyer had the queer thought come to him that the old man’s flabby neck-skin looked like turkey’s wattles, flushed with dull red as they were now.
“That is a cruel taunt—an unjust advantage to take of a man who has served his town so many years, Lawyer Look. I’ll own to you that I do have some pride in the fact that I have been treasurer of this town so long. I have set my heart on being reelected. It’s an old man’s whim, Mr. Look—just an old man’s whim, and it would hurt my feelings cruelly if the voters allowed your brother to work out his grudge in that way. If I could only have another year—if I——”
The lawyer, who had been steadily staring into his shifting eyes, broke in upon his faltering appeal.
“I always hate to see any living creature squirm, whether it’s an angle-worm on a hook or a man on the rack of his own conscience,” he said in his blunt, brusque manner. “I never delighted in torturing anything, Judge. This is something like killing a creature to put it out of its misery, but I’m not going to beat about the bush.”