But he bit that wire right plumb in two.
—Ballads of “Gumption.”
Hiram Look was approaching Palermo village and letting his horse walk up the long Witch-Run hill. He was in the middle of the seat of a brand-new top carriage. His elbows were on his knees and he was gazing at the reflection of himself in the bright dasher of the carriage. Occasionally he broke out into mellow chucklings.
“I’d have given ten dollars if Phin and all close pers’nal friends had been there with me to see it,” he soliloquised. “Me behind the wistery on the porch of the widder’s, a-takin’ it all in, and he not knowin’ I was there! Phew! Lemme git out a few more of them laughs I’ve had to swaller!”
He leaned back and haw-hawed boisterously, to the renewed astonishment of the horse, who stopped and bent his head around to gaze at his master.
“G’long!” shouted the showman. “I’ve told you all about it three times already on the way down. I had to tell some one.”
When the horse plodded on he set his elbows on his knees again and went on with his delighted monologue. He was rolling it again over his tongue with smacks of relish.
“Yess’r, I had him dead to rights! Had the very letters he’s been writin’ to that other string to his bow. And then to have him whine to the widder that he’d writ’ ’em ’cause he felt sometimes that she was gittin’ ready to throw him over and he didn’t want to git left altogether! Why, the dum fool! To tumble down like that at the first puff she give him! Me? Why, I’d ’a’ lied till there was six inches of glare ice in Tophet! I’d ’a’ said I didn’t know how to write! I’d ’a’ said that I’d been sassin’ Jim the Penman’s grandmother and he was gittin’ back at me. But he jest caved. I allus knowed he was a fool.
“And me a-settin’ there with my thumb in my vest armhole, takin’ it all in and fattin’ on the ribs! Why, I’ve heard men git down and beg, I’ve seen dogs set up on end and whine for a bone, I’ve seen a cat coax for milk-strainin’s, but never nothin’ like the way that man got down and rolled over and jumped through and played dead for that widder.
“Cap Nymp’ Bodfish, you kicked me once, and ’twas in the face and eyes of the public, and you was due to git a lot of trouble. I might have kicked you back; I might have gone on and broke a few of your arms and legs and et cet’ry. But it wouldn’t have been a scientific job like this. No, s’r, it wouldn’t have been real soul-satisfyin’. I never got no great consolation out of lickin’ a man.”