The silence endured longer.
“I didn’t mean nothin’ to rasp your feelin’s, ‘Mad’!” his old friend apologised at last. “All is, I pus’nally don’t want to go peekin’ so like sin and Sancho, same’s the people in this place us’ly do when anything comes to town that ain’t cut and dried. I’d really like to know, though, how things is gittin’ squared ’round up to the Squire’s.”
Amazeen remained sullenly silent, but his desire to gossip conquered his spleen at last.
“Wals’r, Lys, it’s wuth your goin’ up,” he broke out with a chuckle. “That el’phunt’s loomin’ up in the middle of the barn floor with her hind leg hitched to a sill beam; them chariot carts is in the yard, the hosses fillin’ the stalls and the tie-up, folks standin’ ’round askin’ questions, and every durn young one in town rampagin’ ’round there! I should think it would drive the Squire out of his mind—him that has allus lived old bach and nothin’ to bother. It has set that old mare of his into spasms. He had to hitch her off in the woodshed, and there she stands with her head and tail up and snortin’ and whickerin’ ev’ry time she thinks of how that el’phunt looked when they was introduced. El’phunt’s name, by the way, is Imogene! Don’t that beat you? Imogene! So Hime said this mornin’. Told us she was a real pet, and he brought her along ’cause she would take on so if he tried to shake her. He’s had her clos’ on fifteen years, he says. Sold her when he bust up his show, but she swatted ’round her with her trunk, Hime says, and stove down bars and bellered Hail Columby and pulled up stakes and got away and follered him. Hime says Imogene is the only one in the world that ever has given a continental cuss for him and stuck to him, and he says that him and her will allus stick to one another after this. Says he’s li’ble to start out circussin’ ag’in.”
“I s’pose the whole neighbourhood’s standin’ ‘round, listenin’ to them yarns, heh?” grumbled Uncle Buck.
“Well, it’s all interestin’ to hear,” declared Ama-zeen sturdily. “And he ain’t nobody’s fool, Hime ain’t.”
“It looks to me,” Uncle Lys growled on, “as though Squire Phin had got more’n one el’phunt on his hands. Here’s Hime a-traipsin’ back home with that gor-rammed turn-out, and before he’s been here no time he sasses the whole town of Palermo, throws Judge Willard over his own fence and tears ’round gen’rally. Here’s the old row between the fam’lies busted out ag’in, and prob’ly more to happen when Klebe Willard gits home and hears of it.”
“Don’t you reckon that Klebe has got fully as many of Hime Look’s marks on him now as he wants to carry?” inquired Amazeen, drily.
“Klebe Willard, cap’n of the ‘Lycurgus Webb,’ turned forty-five, and muscled up from knockin’ down P. I. sailors, ain’t exactly the same feller he was when Hime Look scolloped him off twenty-five years ago,” Amazeen retorted. “I tell you, Lys, you’re going to find out that old ‘Hard-Times’ wasn’t snuffin’ at no pansy bed when he stood there yesterday with his nose up. He was smellin’ trouble.”
Brickett had lounged out of the store and stood munching a sliver of cheese that he had scraped from the broad knife after serving a customer.