At length the board was secured to the carpenter’s satisfaction, for he ceased to hammer and could be heard to feel his work lovingly as he examined its beauties in the half light in which he had labored.
“Good morrow, John Soam,” now said Governor Leverett, having first coughed behind his hand. “Here are several fellow-townsmen come to your place.”
John was seen to give a squirm. “Oh, good morrow,” said he, his voice muffled by the ceiling between him and his friends. “I have been doing a little work. Wait a moment, good friend, till I may gather my nails and tools.”
The five good men waited, hearing John scramble the nails together with a few metallic clinks.
“We went first to your house, David,” said John Winslow to David Donner. “We came to see you and John Soam, as promised, on a matter of some gravity.”
John Soam now, upon making an effort to retreat out of the slender orifice which he had left when he nailed in his board, found his chest and shoulders thicker than his waist. He wriggled. This being of no avail to extricate him, he struggled. A convulsion of activity then seized upon him. He attempted to sit down, he dragged at himself, he began to do unseemly things. But he could not get out. He had hammered in his own head and arms, with many good nails in the board.
His friends below him now overheard a sound which, in a simian, if simians talked at all, would have been a curse. John wrestled as if demons, expert in catch-as-catch-can, were restraining him up there in the attic. He kicked about, with a violence so great as to overthrow the barrel whereon he had been standing. For a second his two blind feet felt about for his whilom support in an agony of helplessness.
“Goodman Leverett,” he then bawled, in tones of repressed emotion, “will you put back that barrel for a moment, till I may come down?”
“If you will constrain your legs to seemly conduct, I will,” said the governor. He and David Donner having received a kick apiece, now reinstated Goodman Soam’s pedestal.
John became quiescent for a moment. His friends shifted about, uneasily.