Rex, who had listened rather indifferently to Phineas’s laudations of Worcester, now asked if he knew much of the adjoining towns,—Leicester, for instance.
“Wa-all, I’d smile,” Phineas replied, with a fierce assault upon the cuspidor. “Yes, I would smile if I didn’t know Leicester. Why, I was born there, and it’s always been my native town, except two or three years in Sturbridge, when I was a shaver, and the time I was to the war and travelin’ round. Pleasant town, but dull,—with no steam cars nigher than Rochdale or Worcester. Got stages and an electric car to Spencer;—run every half hour. Think of goin’ there?”
Rex said he did, and asked the best way of getting there.
“Wa-all, there’s four ways,—the stage, but that’s gone; hire a team and drive out,—that’s expensive; take the steam cars for Rochdale, or Jamesville, and then drive out,—that’s expensive, too; or take the electric, which is cheaper, and pleasanter, and quicker. Know anybody in Leicester?”
Rex said he didn’t, and asked if Phineas knew a place called Hallam Homestead.
“Wa-all, I’d smile if I didn’t,” Phineas replied. “Why, I’ve worked in hayin’-time six or seven summers for Square Leighton. He was ’lected justice of the peace twelve or fifteen years ago, and I call him Square yet, as a title seems to suit him, he’s so different-lookin’ from most farmers,—kind of high-toned, you know. Ort to have been an aristocrat. As to the Hallams, who used to own the place, I’ve heard of ’em ever since I was knee-high; I was acquainted with Carter; first-rate feller. By the way, your name is Hallam. Any kin?”
Rex explained his relationship to the Hallams, while the smile habitual to Phineas’s face, and which, with the expressions he used so often, had given him the sobriquet of Smiling Phin, broadened into a loud laugh of genuine delight and surprise, and, springing up, he grasped Rex’s hand, exclaiming: “This beats the Dutch! I’m glad to see you, I be. I thought you was all dead when Carter died. There’s a pile of you in the old Greenville graveyard. Why, you ’n’ I must be connected.”
Rex looked at him wonderingly, while he went on: “You see, Carter Hallam’s wife was Lucy Ann Brown, and her great-grandmother and my great-grandfather were half-brother and sister. Now, what relation be I to Lucy Ann, or to you?”
Rex confessed his inability to trace so remote a relationship on so hot a day, and Phineas rejoined:
“’Tain’t very near, that’s a fact, but we’re related, though I never thought Lucy Ann hankered much for my society. I used to call her cousin, which made her mad. She was a handsome girl when she clerked it here in Worcester and roped Carter in. A high stepper,—turned up her nose when I ast her for her company. That’s when she was bindin’ shoes, before she knew Carter. I don’t s’pose I could touch her now with a ten-foot pole, though I b’lieve I’ll call the fust time I’m in New York, if you’ll give me your number. Blood is blood. How is the old lady?”