“I’ve no doubt you will,” said the preacher gloomily.
“Yes, you’ll see that I can,” Cynthia declared with animation. “There’s mother on the porch. Good gracious, do change the subject. If she sets in on it, I’ll not come to the table. She likes you and hates the ground Nelson Floyd walks on.”
“Perhaps that, too, will be my damnation,” Hillhouse retorted. “I know something about human nature. I may see the day that I’d be glad of a doubtful reputation.”
He caught her reproachful glance at this remark as he opened the gate for her and followed her in. Porter sat on the porch in the shade reading a newspaper, and his wife stood in the doorway.
“Run in and take off your things, Cynthia,” Mrs. Porter said, with a welcoming smile. “Brother Hillhouse can sit with your pa till we call dinner. I want you to help me a little bit. Your grandmother is lying down, and doesn’t feel well enough to come to the table.”
When the women had gone in, and the preacher had seated himself in a rough, hide-bottomed chair near his host, Porter with a chuckle reached down to the floor and picked up a smooth stick about twenty inches long, to the end of which was attached a piece of leather about three inches wide and four inches long.
“That’s an invention o’ mine,” Porter explained proudly as he tapped his knee with the leather. “Brother Hillhouse, ef you was to offer me a new five-dollar note fer this thing, an’ I couldn’t git me another, I’d refuse p’int-blank.”
“You don’t say,” said Hillhouse, concentrating his attention on the article by strong effort; “what is it for?”
“I don’t know any other name fer it than a ‘fly-flap,’” said Porter. “I set here one day tryin’ to read, an’ the flies made sech a dead set at my bald head that it mighty nigh driv’ me crazy. I kept fightin’ ’em with my paper an’ knockin’ my specs off an’ losin’ my place at sech a rate that I got to studyin’ how to git out of the difficulty, fer thar was a long fly spell ahead of us. Well, I invented this thing, an’ I give you my word it’s as good fun as goin’ a-fishin’. I kin take it in my hand—this way—an’ hold the paper too, an’ the minute one o’ the devilish things lights on my scalp I kin give a twist o’ the wrist an’ that fly’s done fer. You see, the leather is too flat an’ soft to hurt me, an’ I never seen a fly yit that was nimble enough to git out from under it. But my fun is mighty nigh over,” Porter went on. “Flies has got sense; they profit by experience the same as folks does. At any rate, they seem to know thar’s a dead-fall set on my bald spot, an’ they’ve quit tryin’ to lay their eggs in the root-holes o’ my hair. Only now and then a newcomer is foolhardy an’ inclined to experiment. The old customers are as scared o’ my head as they are of a spider-web.”
“That certainly is a rare device,” said Hillhouse. “I don’t know that I ever heard of one before.”