The junction agent pointed out a half-crated table standing by itself; it looked inconceivably old and was of a timber unknown to Brook Center. Its rickety four legs, wrapped separately, tapered off into carvings of opulent nymphs and the wild, laughing faces of dryads and fauns—these legs were observed by the curious groups at the junction to be badly worn and honeycombed with worm-holes.
"For the vanilla," it was whispered from one to another; the junction agent, hand over mouth, bowed himself backward in mirth. "They say it's all from her home, and this is the dinin'-room table. My! My! My! ain't it awful, all them old, ancient things?"
Mr. Pawket, affecting a connoisseurship unconsciously copied from the architect, bent over the table, examining it; with vague puzzlement he passed his hand over its cut and hacked surface—surface on which hundreds of monks of the time of Clement III had whetted their restless knives.
"I don't onderstand it; I don't onderstand it"—the old farmer feebly shook his head—"unless it's she ain't used to nothin' better and he's kep' his mouth shut. 'Twould be like Willum to pertend he didn't care; he was always biddable. M' wife could feed him anythin' from pot-cheese to pork; he was always a great hand to keep the peace."
The junction master watched in leering silence the brittle collection of household fittings being lifted into carts. "Well, I guess I'm glad it ain't me is goin' to have 'em for neighbors," he observed, feelingly. "They 'll fall back on you a good deal, one thing and another; they 'm pretty well broken down in pocket—you can see that."
Mr. Pawket in dumb disappointment climbed up into his wagon and stooped to take the reins. For a few moments he chewed violently with his front teeth before he spat desperately into the junction geranium-bed, asserting with dignity:
"Oh, I guess you got no call to worry. 'Tain't as if they didn't have no friends in this country. Willum's sort of son to me, my own boy bein' long dead. Ef the worst comes to the worst I don't know but what I could make a fist to help him out. Whoa, there!" Mr. Pawket, rising in his seat, backed his team truculently. "Ef anythin's needed," he observed, superbly, "I shall see to it myself—'twould n't take me long to buy him a dining-room table and a few little fixin's so's he could hold up his head in the world."
All the way home Willum's friend pondered the thing. Once when the horses stopped to drink at a wayside trough he slapped his knee fiercely and said: "That's the ticket! Yes, sir, that's the size of it!" At dinner, after the twins had taken their departure, he suggested his plan to his wife; to his immense relief she met the thing in his own spirit.
"A golden-oak dinin'-table, anyway," argued Mr. Pawket. "One or two fancy fixin's so they can hold up their heads in the world."
"And shut people's mouths," agreed his wife. "That hotel-keeper's girl, now, I never see any one more sassy—she with an Everything only half done and sayin' she's goin' to be the first to get one into the vanilla, and yet talkin' something terrible behind them and their furniture's backs."