Squire Inchly's house was convenient to his shop; and just opposite lived the Carews, father and son, once the most prosperous and prominent family in the neighbourhood. It was the custom of Pinetucky to take a half-holiday on Saturdays, and on one of these occasions Squire Inchly, instead of going to his shop or to the store, sat in his porch and smoked his pipe. After a while Miss Jane brought out her sewing and sat with him. Across the way Uncle Billy Carew sat in his easy-chair under the shade of a tree, and made queer gestures in the air with his hands and cane, while his son, a young man of twenty-five or thereabouts, paced moodily up and down the veranda. The birds fluttered in and out of the hedges of Cherokee rose that ran along both sides of the road, and over all the sun shone brightly.
"Billy is cuttin' up his antics ag'in," said the Squire, finally. "First the limbs give way, and then the mind. It's Providence, I reckon. We're all a-gittin' old."
"Why, you talk, Ichabod, as if Providence went around with a drink of dram in one hand and a stroke of palsy in t'other one," said Miss Jane. "It's the Old Boy that totes the dram. And don't you pester yourself on account of old Billy Oarew's palsy. A man's nimble enough in the legs when he can git to the dimmy- john."
"Well, I'm sorry for Jack, Sister Jane," exclaimed the Squire, heartily. "I am, from the bottom of my heart. The boy is too lonesome in his ways. He needs comp'ny; he needs to be holp up, Sister Jane. He does, certain and shore."
"Well, we're all near-sighted; but when Im in trouble, I'm like a hen a-layin'; I don't want nobody to stand around and watch me. Not even them that feeds me. The Lord knows what he keeps old Billy Carew here to fret poor Jack for, but I don't," continued Miss Jane, with a sigh. "I'm much mistaken if that old creetur hain't got years before him to drink and dribble in."
"It passes me, Sister Jane," said Squire Inchly, moving uneasily in his chair. "It passes me, certain and shore. Here was Billy, rich and healthy, Jack at college, and ever'thing a-runnin' slick and smooth, when nothin' must do but the old creetur must take to the jug, and it's gone on and gone on, till old Bradley Gaither owns in-about all the Carew plantation that's wuth ownin'. Maybe it was Billy's wife druv him to it, Sister Jane."
"I say the word!" exclaimed Miss Jane, scornfully,—"I say the word! How could a little bit of a dried-up 'oman drive a grown man to drink?"
"They are a heap livelier than they look to be, Sister Jane," said the Squire reassuringly. "Little as she was, I lay Billy Carew's wife had her say."
"Well," said Miss Jane, "a mouse'll squeal if you tromple on it."
Squire Inchly had a jovial appearance ordinarily; but when he found it necessary to wrestle with the moral problems that the sharp tongue of his sister presented to his mind, he was in the habit of putting on his spectacles, as if by that means to examine them more impartially. He put his spectacles on now, and with them a severe judicial frown.
"That's the trouble, Sister Jane,—that's the trouble," he said after a while. "The mouse'll squeal and squeal, but where's the man that ever got use to sech squealin'?"