“And you’ve stocked up yourself, Phin,” returned his brother, with a rather watery smile. “The Looks usually get pussy after forty.”
Uncle Buck was the first of the crowd to stick out his hand.
“I’d know you anywhere for Hime Look, in spite of your plug hat and your weepin’ wilier whiskers,” he cried brusquely. “You ain’t been what you’d exactly call neighbourly last twenty or twenty-five years,” he suggested, with a meaning cock of his eyebrow.
“I didn’t ask permission of the Palermo Tobacker Chawin’ League to go away, and I ain’t asking its permission to come back!” retorted Hiram, bridling.
“Still got your meat-axe temper along, I notice,” said Buck, drily.
“See here,” shouted the new arrival, “we won’t start into any of those old rows, good people.”
He assumed the tone of the showman “barking” at the door of a tent, as though the habit of long years obsessed him. Apparently he could not talk to several persons in any other tone. The throng crowding about him suggested all his usual environment. “Best to have our general wind-up at the start-off,” he declared, running his eye over them; “we’ll drive every tent peg right now. Here I am home again from the wide, wide world, and it’s no one’s business except mine why I’ve come. I own this gear,” a flourish of his hand toward the waggons and the reeking horses, “and why I’ve brought ’em here is my own business, too. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. You needn’t blink and scowl at me—any of you. I ain’t proud of the way I left this town, but I want to have an understanding here and now. It’s this: The man who proposes to remind me of my going away or my staying away will get what I gave Klebe Willard, and I hope it wasn’t too long ago for you to remember it, one and all.” He clenched his fist and shook it at them. “Yes, I’m just the same old Hime Look, rough and bluff and gruff and tough! No one likes me, and probably no one ever will, and I don’t care! But I can pay my bills.” He rapped this at them, adding an oath like a whipcrack.
A murmur that was almost a growl ran among his listeners, who now numbered a score. “Yes, I did slide out and leave my debts, and I held this town up good and hard, hey? Well, I ain’t crawling back on my hands and knees to you, good people; I’ve come with the goods.” He ripped open his duster and, twisting his tall form and screwing his mouth as he tussled at the job, he pulled a big wallet from under his coat tails—a wallet so fat, so puffy, so rotund that it seemed fairly to groan at its strap and puff with plethora.
The Squire gently seized his brother by the arm, endeavouring to say something to him in an undertone. But that over-wrought person wrenched away and shouted, as he waved his wallet above his head: “No, Phin, it aint no use to hush-baby me. I’ve got to say it to ’em. I’ve been thinking of it too long. It’s boilin’ in me. I always was too mouthy—I’m too mouthy now, and I know it, but I can’t help it. I’m just Hime Look, and I have to talk or bust. They’ve had their chance to lambaste me for twenty-five years behind my back. Now I’m going to talk to their faces.”
Excitedly he tore open the wallet. Packets of bills stuffed every compartment—packets tied with bands and squeezed flat.