He side-stepped and stood athwart his door, the frame of which had been recently narrowed by half, the new boarding showing glaringly against the old. When one understood the situation, this new boarding had a very significant appearance.
Mr. Luce had gone over into Vienna, where his reputation for shiftiness was not as well known, and had secured from Mr. T. Taylor, recently set up in the stove business, a new range with all modern attachments, promising to pay on the instalment plan. Stove once installed, Mr. Luce had immediately begun to "improve" his mansion by building a new door-frame too narrow to permit the exit of the stove. Then Mr. Luce had neglected to pay, and, approached by replevin papers, invoked the statute that provides that a man's house cannot be ripped in pieces to secure goods purchased on credit.
Constable Nute, unable to cope with the problem, had driven to Smyrna village and summoned the first selectman, and the Cap'n had solicited Hiram Look to transport him, never having conquered his sailor's fear of a horse.
"It ain't goin' to be twitted abroad in Vienny nor any other town that we let you steal from outsiders in any such way as this," declared the first selectman, once on the ground. "Folks has allus cal'lated on your stealin' about so much here in town in the run of a year, and haven't made no great fuss about it. But we ain't goin' to harbor and protect any general Red Rover and have it slurred against this town. Take down that scantlin' stuff and let this man have his stove."
"You can squdge me only so fur and no furder," asserted Luce, sullenly, holding down his loose upper lip with his yellow teeth as though to keep it from flapping in the wind. Within the mansion there was the mellow rasp of a tin of biscuit on an oven floor, the slam of an oven door, and Mrs. Luce appeared dusting flour from her hands. All who knew Mrs. Luce knew that she was a persistent and insistent exponent of the belief of the Millerites—"Go-uppers," they called the sect in Smyrna.
"I say you've got to open up and give this man his property," cried Cap'n Sproul, advancing on them.
"Property? Who talks of property?" demanded Mrs. Luce, her voice hollow with the hollowness of the prophet. "No one knows the day and the hour when we are to be swept up. It is near at hand. We shall ride triumphant to the skies. And will any one think of property and the vain things of this world then?"
"Prob'ly not," agreed the Cap'n, sarcastically, "and there won't be any need of a cook-stove in the place where your husband will fetch up. He can do all his cookin' on a toastin'-fork over an open fire—there'll be plenty of blaze."
"Don't squdge me too fur," repeated Mr. Luce, clinging to the most expressive warning he could muster just then.
"It's full time for that critter to be fetched up with a round turn," muttered Constable Nute, coming close to the elbow of the first selectman, where the latter stood glowering on the culprit. "I reckon you don't know as much about him as I do. When his mother was nussin' him, a helpless babe, he'd take the pins out'n her hair, and they didn't think it was anything but playin'. Once he stole the specs off'm her head whilst she was nappin' with him in her arms, and jammed 'em down a hole in the back of the rockin'-chair. Whilst old Doc Burns was vaccinatin' him—and he wa'n't more'n tew years old—he got Doc's watch."