“Why not leave the party go out, then?” says Mis’ Toplady, innocent.
“Listen at that!” says Silas. “Leave the party go out! What do we belong to the party for if we’re willing to leave it go out?”
“What,” says Mis’ Toplady, troubled, “do you belong to it for if you’re willing to leave it stay in along with a bad man?”
“We stand by the party to keep the party from being disrupted, woman,” says Silas.
Mis’ Toplady looks at him, puzzled.
“Well,” she says, “I have made an apple-pie to keep the apples from spoiling, but yet that wasn’t the real, true purpose of the pie.”
Eppleby Holcomb kind of chuckled, and just then we all got jostled for a minute with a lot passing us. Lem Toplady come by, his girl on his arm, and a nice, sheepish grin for his mother. Jimmy Sturgis, Jr., and Hugh Merriman and Mis’ Uppers’s boy and two-three more of that crowd, with boys’ eyes in brown faces, and nice, manly ways to their shoulders. Everybody was walking round between tunes. And everywhere, in and out, under foot, went the children, eight, ten, twelve years apiece to ’em, and couldn’t be left home because they wasn’t anybody to leave ’em with. And there they was, waiting to be Friendship Village when the rest of us should get out of the market square for good; and there was Friendship Village, over beyond the arc light, waiting to be their town.
“Eppleby,” I says, “why don’t you run against Threat, and mayor this town like it ought to be?”
“Because,” Silas spoke up for him, “Eppleby belongs to the party.”
“You do?” says I to Eppleby. “Well, if Threat, that would like to see the world run backwards, and you, that’s a-pushing some on the west side like the Lord meant—if you two belongs to the same party, I bet the party’s about ready to come in two pieces anyhow. Why don’t you leave it go, and get denominated on your own hook, Eppleby?” I ask’ him.