Jack Mackinnon was speaking, his thin dark face wreathed in smiles.
"How d'ye like the blind horse, Mr. Symmons? I tell ye blind horses are smart sometimes! There was one Frank Peters, wot I worked for in Essex, owned, and he never would eat black oats. Critters has their likes and dislikes same as people. I once knowed a dog—but that blind horse—well, he'd never eat black oats when he had his sight—went blind along of drawing heavy loads—doctored him all winter—t'wasn't any use, sight gone, gone complete—well, as I said, he wouldn't eat black oats when he had his sight, and when, the horse was blind, sir, he knowed the difference between black oats and white, yes, just the same as when he had his sight. You couldn't timpt that horse to eat black oats, then or no time, he wouldn't so much as nose at 'em, no sir. You couldn't fool that horse on oats. But pshaw! blind horses! why Henry Acres wot I worked for in Essex—"
"Oh, shut up, Jack!" said Hiram, and Jack accepted his quietus good-naturedly, quite unabashed.
The village arithmetician had once taken the trouble to calculate how long Jack Mackinnon must have worked in Essex, deducing the amount from Jack's account of the number of years he had worked for different people there. The result showed Jack must have spent some hundred and sixty years in Essex if all his tales were true; and Jack always repudiated with scorn any question of his veracity, hoping, with great fervour and solemnity, that he "drop down dead in his tracks" if he was lying, a judgment which never overtook him.
The talk turned upon politics, as it always did if Oscar Randall was there, and old Sam Symmons was soon holding forth.
"Yes," he said, "yes, the old elections were wont to be rare times. I do remember at one election, near the close of the polls, beguiling Ezra Thompson to a barn, and there two of us held him, by main strength and bodily force, till the polls were closed. Truly he was an angry and profane man when we set him free"—here came a reminiscent chuckle, cut short to answer Oscar Randall's tentative question.
"Trouble? Get us into trouble? Yes, of a private kind. Ezra Thompson and I fought that question with our fists some seventeen times, and the lad with me had much the same number of bouts over it. But we neither of us begrudged him satisfaction. In those days a man took satisfaction out of his enemy's skin; he didn't sneak away to lawyers to bleed him in his pocket. No, no.
"Yes, 'twere a great election that! Twas the time Mr. Brown ran against Mr. Salmon. Now, it was told of Mr. Salmon, that though of good presence, and very high and mighty towards his neighbours, yet he was ignorant; and when his election came on, it was told of him how he met an English gentleman on the train once, who, wishing to learn of Canada, spoke at length with Mr. Salmon, and in the course of the talk (during which Mr. Salmon was much puffed up), the English gentleman said to him: 'And have you many reptiles in Canada?' 'No,' said Mr. Salmon (and a pompous man he was, very)—'No, we have very few reptiles, only a few foxes.' It was Mr. Salmon, too, who once refused when he was J.P. to look into the case of a poor man whose horse's leg had been broken in a bad culvert. And the man cried in a gust of rage: 'What! did you not swear to see justice done? and now you won't consider this?' 'Swear,' said Mr. Salmon, 'I did no such thing. I only took my affidavit.'" Old Sam's voice died away.
Hiram spoke from behind the counter. "The roadmasters do bring the country into terrible expenses. Look at the bill of costs that's been run up in that case at Jamestown."
"Yes," said Oscar Randall, as one having authority, "the people's money is wasted in this country with an awful disregard of the public welfare."