Across the kitchen, however, the comments were less cordial: "Did you hear? And think of bringing her to a church supper! You mustn't breathe a word but Temperance Crandall told me in strictest confidence...."
Meanwhile Gus, red of face and almost tongue-tied with embarrassment had been put to work mashing the potatoes. Women came with milk, butter, salt, and advice while Gus mashed on. Gus thought that perhaps he would not have been embittered about women so early in life had it not been for twenty-five years of church suppers.
2
Above the First National Bank of Brailsford Junction with its wooden Doric columns and gilt-lettered windows was the office of Timothy Halleck, attorney at law, justice of the peace, dealer in real estate and farm mortgages, notary, and Protestant father-confessor for half the town.
To him came ranting suffragettes; militant members of the W.C.T.U. bent on destruction of the town's twenty-six easy-going saloon proprietors; the saloon proprietors; fathers of wayward girls; mothers of incorrigible boys; wives who were beaten, and husbands who had been cuckolded. Into Timothy's great hairy ears were poured the despairs and heartbreaks which have been the lot of man these many centuries.
His office was nothing less than amazing. Buffalo skulls and polished buffalo horns from his brother's ranch in Montana elbowed stuffed fish, antlers of deer, and the head of a wild cat upon the walls; five hundred dusty law tomes filled the sagging shelves; in a glass case stood a shock of prize Wisconsin wheat, seed corn, and dirty mason jars filled with every variety of grain known to horticulture. Enormous leaves of Wisconsin tobacco framed and labeled, Indian quivers, and year-old calendars vied for space on the wainscoting.
Half a dozen swivel chairs and as many spittoons gave the spot an air of luxurious informality to visiting farmers, whose well informed nostrils might have quivered distrustfully at the dusty stench of rotting law books had it not been synthesized with the comfortable aroma from the livery stable next door.
Timothy Halleck himself, six feet two, large-boned, gaunt, hawk-nosed, with great brown eyes deep-socketed and thatched above with bristling brows, white-haired and gruff, ruled like a kindly tyrant in his chaotic kingdom. He was the town's one-man organized charity, a poverty-stricken philanthropist who denied himself so that he might help others; a widower, lonesome and fond of children.
He had a few old friends, among them Stanley Brailsford now entering his office.
"Well, Timothy," said Stud, uncomfortable in his serge suit and well-blacked bulldog shoes, "still making a living robbing the widows and orphans?"