“Well, you don’t have to walk very fur in this sun to find out that she ain’t gone yit,” remarked an old man who had just arrived. He picked a few fresh burdock leaves and stuffed them into the crown of his cotton hat. “Some one ought to make ’Quar’us Wharff come in here out o’ that sun,” he growled, scowling at a figure that stood on the corner of Brickett’s store platform, as straight and stiff as the gnawed hitching-post on the opposite corner.
With cadence fully as sleepy as the other sounds of the languorous afternoon, a squeaking whiffle-tree came down the avenue of elms that bordered the street.
The whiffle-tree was attached to a surrey that showed a city smartness of paint and trimmings under the dust. The bulk of the man on the front seat strained his linen coat. The two ladies on the back seat, evidently his wife and daughter, fairly crushed the springs with their weight.
The portly man pulled up at the watering trough in Palermo’s little square and grunted over the wheel. When the horses began to wallow in the tub, plunging their reeking noses almost to their eyes, he handed the reins to his wife and walked toward the store, his gaze upon a bunch of wilted bananas that dangled just inside the door.
The six gaunt men in the shade surveyed this triple display of city avoirdupois with disfavour. Somehow it all seemed a silent boast of urban prosperity.
“I don’t reckon his woman needs to hang onto them reins very tight,” grunted Uncle Lysimachus Buck. “It’s all them horses can do to walk with that load—much less run away.”
“All city folks do is stuff themselves mornin’, noon and night, and then ’tween meals,” said Marriner Amazeen. “He’s after suthin’ to eat now, and I’ll bet ye on it.”
“How much for a dozen of those bananas?” asked the rotund man, addressing the individual who stood so stiffly on the corner of the platform.
“Wind sou’ by one p’int to the west, havin’ swung from west by nothe,” was the reply. He did not look at his questioner, but kept his head straight and his nose in the air.
“That ain’t nothin’ but ’Quar’us havin’ a weather-vane spell,” apologised Brickett, appearing in the door and lounging against the side of the building. He drawled, “I’ll sell ye fifteen for a quarter. Help yourself.”