It was the queerest turnout that ever invaded Smyrna Corner.
Even the frogs of Smyrna swamp at the edge of the village gulped back their pipings, climbed the bank for a nearer view, and goggled in astonished silence as it passed, groaning, in the soft and early dusk.
’Twas a sort of van—almost a little house on wheels, with an elbow of stove funnel sticking out of one side. An old chaise top was fastened by strings and wire over a seat in front. Dust and mud covered everything with striated coatings, mask eloquent of wanderings over many soils. A cadaverous horse, knee-sprung and wheezy, dragged the van at the gait of a caterpillar.
Under the chaise top was hunched an old man, gaunt but huge of frame, his knees almost to his chin. Long, white hair fluffed over his bent shoulders, and little puffs of white whiskers stood out from his tanned cheeks. A fuzzy beaver hat barely covered the bald spot on his head. The reins were looped around his neck. Between his hands, huge as hams, moaned and sucked and suffled and droned a much-patched accordion. The instrument lamented like a tortured animal as he pulled it out and squatted it together. To its accompaniment, the old man sang over and over some words that he had fitted to the tune of “Old Dog Tray,”
“Plug” Ivory Buck sat outside the door of his “emporium” in Smyrna Corner, his chair tipped back comfortably, ankle roosting across his knee, his fuzzy stovepipe hat on the back of his head.
The end of his cigar, red in the May dusk, was cocked up close to his left eye with the arrogant tilt that signified the general temperament of “Plug” Ivory. For almost fifty years a circus man, he felt a bland and yet contemptuous superiority to those who had passed their lives in Smyrna Corner. However, when his father had died at the ripe age of ninety-three—died in the harness, even while gingerly and thriftily knuckling along a weight into the eighth notch of the bar of the scoop scales—Ivory had come back as sole heir to store, stock and stand, a seventy-two-year-old black sheep bringing a most amazing tail behind him—no less than a band chariot, a half dozen animal cages, a tent loaded on a great cart, and various impedimenta of “Buck’s Leviathan Circus and Menagerie.”
He trundled the array through the village’s single street, stored the gilded glories in the big barn on the old home place, with the euphemism of circus terminology changed the sign “A. Buck, General Store,” to “I. Buck, Commercial Emporium,” and there he had lived five years, keeping “bachelor’s hall” in the big house adjoining the store.
Sometimes he dropped vague hints that he might start on the road again, displaying as much assurance of long years ahead as though he were twenty-one. It was a general saying in Smyrna Corner that a Buck didn’t think he was getting old until after he had turned ninety. The townspeople accepted Ivory as a sort of a wild goose of passage, called him “Plug” on account of his never varying style of headgear, and deferred to him because he had fifty thousand dollars tucked away in the savings bank at the shire.
The May dusk became tawny in the west, and he gazed out into it discontentedly.