He greeted no one as he entered. A silent tongue was one of Jim Trundle’s peculiarities. Few people had ever gotten a dozen consecutive words out of him. He strode to the end of the store, thrust his hand into an open cracker-box, bit into a large square cracker, and sent his eyes foraging along both counters for something to eat with it—cheese, butter, a bit of honey, or a pinch of dried beef. He was violating no rule of country store etiquette, for Alf Carden’s customers all understood that those things left on the counters were to be partaken of in moderation. I think the habitués of the place had gradually introduced this custom themselves years before, when Carden was so anxious to draw people from the store across the river that he would willingly have given a customer bed and board for an indefinite time if by so doing he could have deprived his rival of the profit on a bag of salt.
Jim Trundle wasn’t going to ask if there was any mail for him, that was plain to the curious onlookers; and their glances began to play back and forth between Carden and the cracker consumer, making demands on the former and condemning the latter for not more readily walking into the trap set for him.
Wade Sims winked when he caught the storekeeper’s eye, and nodded toward the gaunt robber, who had squatted at the faucet of a syrup-barrel and was cautiously trailing a golden stream over an immaculate cracker.
“So you didn’t git no letter fer me, Alf,” said Sims, significantly. “Seems like no mail don’t come this way here lately hardly at all. I hope all the rest ’ll have their ride fer nothin’ too.”
Alf Carden understood, having given Sims a letter half an hour before, and he smiled. “No,” he said, “thar hain’t nothin’ fer any of you except Jim Trundle; has he come along yet?”
Jim stood up quickly, and laid his besmeared cracker on the barrel. “Me?” he ejaculated, and a white puff shot from his crunching jaws; “I—I reckon yo ‘re mistaken.”
“I reckon I kin read,” replied Carden, still acting his part nonchalantly, and glancing askance at Sims to see how that individual was taking it. “It is jest Jim Trundle in plain ABC letters. It is either from somebody that cayn’t write shore ’nough writin’ ur is tryin’ to disguise his handwrite.”
Carden threw the letter on the counter. It lay there fully a minute, while Jim Trundle wiped his hands on his trousers, gulped down a mouthful of cracker, and stared helplessly round at the upturned faces. Then he reached for the letter, and with trembling fingers tore it open and read as follows:
“Jim Trundle. This is to give you due notice. We the reglar organized band of Regulators of this settlement hav set on yore case an decided what we are goin to do about it. Time and agin good citizens have advised you to change yore way of livin’, but you jest went along as before, in the same old rut.
“You are no earthly account, an no amount of talkin seems to do you any good. Yore childern are in tatters an without food, an you jest wont do nothin fer them. This might hav gone on longer without our action, but last Wednesday you let yore sick wife go to the field in the hot brilin sun, an she was seed by a responsible citizen in a faintin condition, while you was on the creek banks a fishin in the shade.