Avery glanced at the showman slyly to note how he received this information.
“I have squared all accounts with Klebe Willard,” said Hiram, “but if I owe him anything more he can come and collect it. As for his father, that’s another matter. He took my old father by the throat after I went away and he had the twist noose of a mortgage around him for a good hold. He bought in accounts against us, as ev’ryone in P’lermo knows, so that he could collect the bills in a way to add ev’ry cent of costs that skin-skunk lawyers could tack on. And my old father and my brother was caught foul and paid double—yes, treble—for ev’ry dollar I owed. I ain’t nothin’ except plain muck, Avery—just a cheap renegade that hasn’t woke up to be half decent till it is too late. Payin’ it back to Phin don’t fix it. I shall always hate myself—but never mind that!” He swallowed hard and shook his head violently to and fro. Sudden passion blazed out of this moment of weakness. “There’s one thing I can do—I can spend forty thousand dollars puttin’ Coll Willard where he put my old father, and, by the gods, I’ll do it! That’s my business and no one’s else, and they can’t oh-please-don’t me!—no one, Avery, no one!”
“Oh, I reckon the Judge is too well fixed for you,” observed Avery, wagging his head. “The Willards was always wuth money—plenty of it.”
Hiram did not reply. But he snorted contemptuously and his eye had a strange look of craft and secret intelligence. “S’pose your brother will be your lawyer,” suggested Avery.
“Look-a-here, Figger-four,” cried the showman, “I’ve been drippin’ away to you as usual without meanin’ to say half that I have. My brother Phin has been abused by old Willard, right and left, but he has been too easy to fight back the way he ought to. I’m squarin’ things for our family in gen’ral, but it has got to be done without Phin’s knowin’ it. Do you see? I want to use you some, first and last, and you’ll get your pay, but if you say one single word to Phin about what I’m doin’, I’ll twist that other leg of yours till the joint comes behind like a cow’s hind gambrel. Me and you, and mum! You understand!”
Avery apprehensively promised and escaped, evidently fearful lest more secrets were to be entrusted to him. He felt that he wasn’t capable of safely holding any more just then. But the consciousness that Hiram Look was meditating the overthrow of such a magnate as Judge Willard propped his eyes open a bit more widely as he hopped about the street, and people began to wonder why Figger-four so often caught himself up in his discourse and looked scared and hurried away. They didn’t realise how anxiously the poor sieve was struggling to hold his secrets. The constant and sulphurous threats of Hiram started the cold sweat whenever they conferred together. Day by day Avery brought new bits of information that the showman sent him to dig out of people, and day by day Hiram fitted the information, piece to piece, only himself knowing to what it all tended.
He sat most of the time in the porch of the old house, smoking long cigars, the parrot occasionally croaking his familiar cry as he waddled about his cage, that was suspended from the porch roof.
“My office,” Hiram called the porch.
People who wanted to borrow money, old acquaintances, folks who loafed along that way to hear his stories of wanderings, came and sat on the turf of the yard or on the steps. The showman shunned Brickett’s store and the other gathering places of the village. Once, Hard-Times Wharff came up and started to have a weather-vane spell on the Look porch, but Hiram drove him away with violent contumely.
“He’s crazier’n a barn rat in a thrashing machine,” the showman observed to his faithful Avery. “Why, I hear he even said I was bringing trouble into this place, the old liar. I’ve only come to straighten out trouble, that’s all. Smoothin’ and glossin’ things over and lettin’ people kick you around and never objectin’ may be some folks’ idea of livin’, but it ain’t mine. And I don’t allow anyone to say I’m makin’ trouble when I’m doin’ a duty. You tell that to ’em in the village, Avery, and you tell old Whatyecallum Wharff, there, that I’ll feed him to Imogene if he snoops ’round here again.”