“I struck him across the mouth.”
“Oh, I missed that,” said the Squire, regretfully. “Why the pat?”
“I could not express my feelings in any other way. As to what those feelings were and why he stirred them, I'll have to ask you to excuse me, Squire Hexter. If I were going to stay in the bank I would explain the matter to you and to the directors. But I'm going to resign. Under these conditions, nobody has the right to tear the heart out of me and stick it up for a topic of conversation.”
The Squire glanced sideways at the convulsed face of the cashier and opened his eyes wide; but he promptly hid his wonderment and checked an exclamation that sounded like a question. “I reckon all of us better wait till morning, son—Tasper and you and I and all the rest.” He looked up at the bright stars in a hard sky. “A snappy night like this will cool things off considerable.”
“I'll wait till morning, sir! Then I propose to resign,” Frank insisted.
“Don't say anything like that in front of Xoa,” pleaded Squire Hexter. “I don't ever want to see again on her face the look she wore when she followed our own Frank to the cemetery; now that she has sort of adopted you, boy, I'm afraid she'll have the same look if she had to follow you to Ike Jones's stage.”
The supper was waiting, as the Squire had predicted; but he took no chances on sitting at table at once and having her keen woman's eyes survey Vaniman's somber face; he feared that her solicitude would open up a dangerous topic.
“Leave your biscuits in for a few minutes, Mother,” the Squire urged. “Let's have some literature for an appetizer.”
So he sat down and read the brotherly tribute in the new issue of The Hornet, and Xoa's eyes glistened behind her spectacles, though she decorously deplored the heat of the sting dealt by Usial. Frank, watching her efforts to hide mirth and display womanly concern at this distressing affair between brothers, forgot some of his own troubles in his amusement. Therefore the Squire's tactics were successful, and the talk at the supper table over the hot biscuits and the cold chicken and the damson preserves was concerned merely with the characters of the brothers Britt. Squire Hexter did mention, casually, that Frank had succeeded in inducing Tasper to stop whipping Usial. Xoa reached and patted the young man's arm and blessed him with her eyes.
Frank, as usual, helped Xoa to clear away the supper things. Early in his stay he had been obliged to beg for permission to do it, and she had consented at last when he pleaded that it made him feel less like a boarder in the Hexter home.