The drum corps came first, twenty strong, snares and basses rattling and booming, the fifers with arms akimbo and cheeks like bladders.
Hiram Look, ex-showman and once proprietor of "Look's Leviathan Circus and Menagerie," came next, lonely in his grandeur. He wore his leather hat, with the huge shield-fin hanging down his back, the word "Foreman" newly lettered on its curved front. He carried two leather buckets on his left arm, and in his right hand flourished his speaking-trumpet. The bed-wrench, chief token of the antiquity of the Ancients, hung from a cord about his neck, and the huge bag, with a puckering-string run about its mouth, dangled from his waist.
At his heels shambled the elephant, companion of his circus wanderings, and whose old age he had sworn to protect and make peaceful. A banner was hung from each ear, and she slouched along at a brisk pace, in order to keep the person of her lord and master within reach of her moist and wistful trunk. She wore a blanket on which was printed: "Imogene, Mascot of the Smyrna Ancients." Imogene was making herself useful as well as ornamental, for she was harnessed to the pole of "Hecla Number One," and the old tub "ruckle-chuckled" along at her heels on its little red trucks. From its brake-bars hung the banners won in the past-and-gone victories of twenty years of musters. Among these was one inscribed "Champions."
And behind Hecla marched, seventy-five strong, the Ancients of Smyrna, augmented, by Hiram Look's enterprise, until they comprised nearly every able-bodied man in the old town.
To beat and pulse of riotous drums and shrilling fifes they were roaring choruses. It was the old war song of the organization, product of a quarter-century of rip-roaring defiance, crystallized from the lyrics of the hard-fisted.
They let the bass drums accent for them.
"Here wec-come from old Sy-myrná
Here wec-come with Hecly One;
She's the prunes for a squirt, gol durn her—
We've come down for fight or fun.
Shang, de-rango! We're the bo-kay,
Don't giveadam for no one no way.
"Here wec-come—sing old A'nt Rhody!
See old Hecly paw up dirt.
Stuff her pod with rocks and sody,
Jee-ro C'ris'mus, how she'll squirt!
Rip-te-hoo! And a hip, hip, holler,
We'll lick hell for a half a dollar!"
The post-office windows rattled and shivered in the sunshine. Horses along the line of march crouched, ducked sideways, and snorted in panic. Women put their fingers in their ears as the drums passed. And when at the end of each verse the Ancients swelled their red-shirted bosoms and screamed, Uncle Trufant hissed in the ear of his nearest neighbor on the post-office steps: "The only thing we need is the old Vienny company here to give 'em the stump! Old Vienny, as it used to be, could lick 'em, el'funt and all."
The Smyrna Ancients were file-closers of the parade; Hiram Look had chosen his position with an eye to effect that made all the other companies seem to do mere escort duty. The orderly lines of spectators poured together into the street behind, and went elbowing in noisy rout to the village square, the grand rallying-point and arena of the day's contests. There, taking their warriors' ease before the battle, the Ancients, as disposed by their assiduous foreman, continued the centre of observation.