These remarks were reckoned smart by those who perpetrated them, and were by no means meant for real slurs on the individual at whom they were pointed. Indeed they were delivered in guarded undertones, so that he might not hear them; and he, meanwhile, utterly ignorant of affording any sport, continued his examination of the house, the while some happy frogs in a neighboring pond rolled out a rattling, jubilant chorus, and the summer wind poured through the leafy tops of the tall elms and athletic burr oaks with a swash and roar like a turbulent river.
"What am I now offered for this magnificent property? Come, give me a bid! Speak up lively! What do I hear for the house?"
The auctioneer, as he spoke, let his eyes wander up the walls of the old, dingy building, to where the blue birds and the peewees had built in the cracks and along the warped cornice and broken window frames, and just then it chanced that a woman's face appeared at one of those staring holes, which, with broken lattice and shattered glass, still might be called a window. The face was a plump, cheerful one, the more radiant from contrast with the dull wall around it—a face one could never forget, however, and would recall often, if for nothing but the fine fall of yellow hair that framed it in. It was a sweet, winning, intellectual face, full of the gentlest womanly charms.
"Forty dollars for the house, 'oman and all!" cried Big Medicine, gazing up at the window in which, for the merest moment, the face appeared.
The man with the green spectacles darted a quick glance at the speaker.
"I am bid forty dollars, gentlemen, forty dollars, do all hear? Agoing for forty dollars! Who says fifty?" bawled the auctioneer.
The crowd now swayed earnestly forward, closing in solid order around the goods box. Many whiskered, uncouth, but not unkindly faces were upturned to the window only in time to see the beautiful woman disappear quite hastily.
"Hooray for the gal!" cried a lusty youth, whose pale blue eyes made no show of contrast with his faded hair and aguish complexion. "Dad, can't ye bid agin the doctor so as I kin claim 'er?"
"Fifty dollars!" shouted the sunburnt man addressed as Dad.
This made the crowd lively. Every man nudged his neighbor, and the aguish, blue-eyed boy grinned in a ghastly, self-satisfied way.