"Something's broke loose," announced Bill, slamming the door violently. "Pap's bought an automobile." Which illuminative remark indicated that Judge Bowers's mind had expanded to let in a fresh vagary.
Jap looked up inquiringly.
"I reckon it's all on account of Billy Wamkiss," Bill explained.
"Billy who? There never was no such animal," and Jap scowled at the stick in his hand. Conditions in Bloomtown were, as Jim Blanke expressed it, all to the bad. While the political fight was at white heat the Mayor had contrived to have his own way. He was going to "make the town" which Ellis Hinton had failed to make. There would be revenue enough to provide metropolitan improvements, and already there was a metropolitan, perhaps even a Monte Carlo-tan, air to the recently awakened village, as every train disgorged its Saturday evening crowd of gamblers from the city where the lid had gone on with ruthless completeness.
Mrs. Granger had arisen from a sick-bed to call together the women of all the churches to make protest at the licensing of another pool-room, with bar and poker attachment, not two blocks from her home, a stroke that had met its counter stroke when the saloon element threatened to boycott Granger's bank and open a rival financial institution in one of the store-rooms of the recently erected hotel that faced the Court House Square, half a block away. Another crowd, the men with store-rooms and cottages to rent, promised to carry all their banking business to Barton, if Granger didn't "sit on his wife good and proper."
"Never was no such animal?" Bill repeated. "Wake up, Jap. Don't you know who Billy Wamkiss is?"
"Never heard of the guy," Jap insisted.
"He's that greasy, wall-eyed temperance lecturer that's been stringing the town for a week."
"Humph!" Jap snorted. "Time for you to wake up, Bill. You brought in the ad yourself, and you wrote the account of the first lecture. The columns of the Herald will bear me out that the reverend gentleman's name is Silas Parsons."
"Yes, that's his reverend name," Bill snorted. "When he's the advance agent of a rotgut whiskey house over in Kentucky that supplies fancy packages to all the dry territory around here, he's plain Billy Wamkiss."