He slid off the porch and started away, beckoning them after him with the battered derby.
"I've heard 'em buzz in my time, too," sneered Hiram, pushing back his plug hat, "but that hummin' is about the busiest yet. He could hold a lighted taller candle in his hand and jump off'm a roof and think he was a comet."
But the Cap'n did not seem to be disposed to echo this scorn.
"This here I've got may be only a notion, and it prob'ly is," he said, knotting his gray brows, "and it don't seem sensible. First sight of him you wouldn't think he could be used. But when I laid eyes on old Dot-and-carry-one there, and when he grabbed into this thing the way he did just as I was thinkin' hard of what Colonel Gid Ward has done to me, it came over me that I was goin' to find a use for him."
"How?" persisted the utilitarian Hiram.
"Don't have the least idea," confessed the Cap'n. "It's like pickin' up a stockin' full of wet mud and walkin' along hopin' that you'll meet the man you want to swat with it. I'm goin' to pick him up."
He stumped off the piazza and followed Mr. Bodge. And Hiram, stopping to relight his cigar, went along, too, reflecting that when a man has plenty of time on his hands he can afford to spend a little of it on the gratification of curiosity.
The first exhibits in the domain of Bodge were not cheering or suggestive of value. For instance, from among the litter in a tumble-down shop Mr. Bodge produced something in the shape of a five-pointed star that he called his "Anti-stagger Shoe."
"I saw old Ike Bradley go past here with a hard-cider jag that looped over till its aidges dragged on the ground," he explained. "I tied cross-pieces onto his feet and he went along all level. Now see how a quick mind like mine acts? Here's the anti-stagger shoe. To be kept in all city clubs and et cetry. Let like umbrellas. Five places in each shoe for a man to shove his foot. Can't miss it. Then he starts off braced front, sides, and behind."
Hiram sniffed and the Cap'n was pensive, his thoughts apparently active, but not concerned in any way with the "Anti-stagger Shoe."