“You guessed right the very first pop—it's the Lysandy Curds,” said Judge Priest grimly.
“Well, for one I'm not surprised,” said Mr. Milam. “If poor old Lysander hadn't stayed blind for about two years after the rest of this town got its eyes wide open this suit would have been filed long before now.”
But Judge Priest didn't hear him. He had closed the door.
Mr. Milam looked meaningly at Mr. Birdsong. Mr. Birdsong felt in his pocket for his plug and helped himself to a copious chew, meanwhile looking meaningly back at Mr. Milam. With the cud properly bestowed in his right jaw Mr. Birdsong gave vent to what for him was a speech of considerable length: '“Jedge said Bigger & Quigley, didn't he? Well, they're a good smart team of lawyers, but ef I was in Lysander John Curd's shoes I think I'd intrust my interests in this matter to a different firm than them.”
“Who's that?” inquired Mr. Milam.
“It's a Yankee firm up North,” answered Mr. Birdsong, masticating slowly. “One named Smith and the other'n named Wesson.”
It will be noted that our worthy sheriff fell plump into the same error over which Judge Priest's feet had stumbled a few minutes earlier—he assumed offhand, Sheriff Birdsong did, that in this cause of Curd against Curd the husband was to play the rôle of the party aggrieved. Indeed, we may feel safe in assuming that at first blush almost anybody in our town would have been guilty of that same mistake. The real truth in this regard, coming out, as it very shortly did—before sunset of that day, in fact—gave the community a profound shock. From house to house, from street to street and from civic ward to civic ward the tale travelled, growing as it went. The Daily Evening News carried merely the barest of bare statements, coupled with the style of the action and the names of the attorneys for the plaintiff; but with spicy added details, pieced out from surmise and common rumour, the amazing tidings percolated across narrow roads and through the panels of partition fences with a rapidity which went far toward proving that the tongue is mightier than the printed line, or at least is speedier.
When you see a woman hasten forth from her house with eyes that burn and hear her hail her neighbour next door; when you see their two heads meet above the intervening pickets and observe that one is doing the talking and the other is doing the listening, sucking her breath in, gaspingly, at frequent intervals; and when on top of this you take note that, having presently parted company with the first, the second woman speeds hot-foot to call her neighbour upon the other side, all men may know by these things alone that a really delectable scandal has been loosed upon the air. Not once but many times this scene was enacted in our town that night, between the going-down of the sun and the coming-up of the moon. Also that magnificent adjunct of modern civilisation, the telephone, helped out tremendously in spreading the word.
Hard upon the heels of the first jolting disclosure correlated incidents eventuated, and these, as the saying goes, supplied fuel to the flames. Just before supper-time old Mr. Ly-sander Curd went with dragging feet and downcast head to Mrs. Teenie Morrill's boarding house, carrying in one hand a rusty valise, and from Mrs. Morrill he straightway engaged board and lodging for an indefinite period. And in the early dusk of the evening Mrs. Lysander Curd drove out in the smart top-phaeton that her husband had given her on her most recent birthday—she sitting very erect and handling the ribbons on her little spirited bay mare very prettily, and seemingly all oblivious to the hostile eyes which stared at her from sidewalks and porch fronts. About dark she halted at the corner of Clay and Contest, where a row of maples, new fledged with young leaves, made a thick shadow across the road.
Exactly there, as it so chanced, State Senator Horace K. Maydew happened to be loitering about, enjoying the cooling breezes of the spring night, and he lifted his somewhat bulky but athletic forty-year-old form into the phaeton alongside of the lady. In close conversation they were seen to drive out Contest and to turn into the Towhead Road; and—if we may believe what that willing witness, old Mrs. Whitridge, who lived at the corner of Clay and Contest, had to say upon the subject—it was ten minutes of eleven o'clock before they got back again to that corner. Mrs. Whitridge knew the exact hour, because she stayed up in her front room to watch, with one eye out of the bay window and the other on the mantel clock. To be sure, this had happened probably a hundred times before—this meeting of the pair in the shadows of the water maples, this riding in company over quiet country roads until all hours—but by reason of the day's sensational developments it now took on an enhanced significance. Mrs. Whitridge could hardly wait until morning to call up, one by one, the members of her circle of intimate friends. I judge the telephone company never made much money off of Mrs. Whitridge even in ordinary times; she rented her telephone by the month and she used it by the hour.