I stammered out something about not understanding that.
“But I do,” said Landlord Vose. “Your uncle Deck wants to get into politics in this town—he wants to get into politics far enough so that he can do something to Judge Kingsley. He reckons you don’t need any popularity. He is starting you out with considerable of a handicap if you mean to live and prosper in your own town. However, I won’t do anything to encourage you to leave! I’ve got to keep on living in the town—alongside your uncle Deck!”
A flash of family loyalty prompted me to assert that my uncle was good to the poor.
“That he is,” said Dodovah Vose. “He is a queer man, your uncle is. But I don’t want to make a pauper of myself in order to curry favor with him.”
It came to me that I’d better have a talk with my uncle, and I started out, crossing the village square on my way home.
All at once something landed heavily and violently on my shoulders, and the attack was so sudden that I was borne to the ground with such a crack of my forehead on the hard earth that I became unconscious, but not until I had felt claws of some sort tearing at my cheeks.
When I came to my senses I was back in the tavern foreroom and Dodovah Vose was swabbing my face with a sponge wet in warm water. In a corner of the room Constable Nute and two helpers were hog-tying old Bennie Holt, the village fool.
“I ain’t a dove of peace no longer—I ain’t a rooster no longer,” he was squalling. “I’m a bald-headed eagle! They told me I’m an eagle. I allus knowed I was some kind of a fowl. They lied to me when they said I was a dove of peace. I’m an eagle. See what I’ve done! I’ve mallywhacked him. He made fun of me when I was a dove. Others made fun of me—but now they’d better look out. I’m an eagle.”
Whatever the old idiot had been or thought he had been, he was then plainly a raving maniac. In his struggles he was shedding turkey feathers with which he had thatched his coat. As far back as I could remember old Bennie Holt, he used to stand in the square with feathers of various sorts stuck around his hat, harmlessly indulging his vagary. But never before had he raised his hand against any human being.
“I reckon that this time you fired a boomerang, young Sidney,” stated the constable, reproachfully. “Old Bangs didn’t fly back and hit you, but this one has. The village will be glad to hear it.”