Cap'n Sproul was close to the banking.
"Luce," he said, savagely, "I ain't out here to-day to discuss law p'ints nor argy doctrines of religion. You've got a stove there that belongs to some one else, and you either pay for it or give it up. I'm willin' to be fair and reasonable, and I'll give you fifteen seconds to pay or tear down that door framework."
But neither alternative, nor the time allowed for acceptance, seemed to please Mr. Luce. In sudden, weak anger at being thus cornered after long immunity, he anathematized all authority as 'twas vested in the first selectman of Smyrna. Several men passing in the highway held up their horses and listened with interest.
Emboldened by his audience, spurred to desperate measures, Mr. Luce kicked out one of his rubber boots at the advancing Cap'n. The Cap'n promptly grasped the extended leg and yanked. Mr. Luce came off his perch and fell on his back in the mud, and Constable Nute straddled him instantly and held him down. With an axe that he picked up at the dooryard woodpile, Cap'n Aaron hammered out the new door-frame, paying no heed to Mr. Luce's threats or Mrs. Luce's maledictions.
"I don't know the law on it, nor I don't care," he muttered between his teeth as he toiled. "All I know is, that stove belongs to T. Taylor, of Vienny, and he's goin' to have it."
And when the new boarding lay around him in splinters and the door was wide once more, he led the way into the kitchen.
"You undertake to throw that hot water on me, Mis' Luce," he declared, noting what her fury was prompting, "and you'll go right up through that roof, and it won't be no millennium that will boost you, either."
The stove man and Hiram followed him in and the disinterested onlookers came, too, curiosity impelling them. And as they were Smyrna farmers who had suffered various and aggravating depredations by this same Aholiah Luce, they were willing to lend a hand even to lug out a hot stove. The refulgent monarch of the kitchen departed, with the tin of biscuit still browning in its interior, passed close to the cursing Mr. Luce, lying on his back under Nute's boring knee, and then with a lusty "Hop-ho! All together!" went into T. Taylor's wagon.
Mr. Luce, freed now as one innocuous, leaped up and down in a perfect ecstasy of fury. "You've squdged me too fur. You've done it at last!" he screamed, with hysteric iteration. "You've made me a desp'rit' outlaw."
"Outlaw! You're only a cheap sneak-thief!"