Silas put back his head and laughed, tolerant.
“I guess,” he says, “you ain’t been following very close the business affairs of this country.”
“Following them was how I come to understand about you,” I says simple. And I might have added, “And knowing about you, I can see how it is with them.”
For all of a sudden, I see how he thought of these things, and for a minute it et up my breath. It had always seemed to me that men that done things like this to other folks’s little business was wicked men in general. That they kind of got behind being legal and grinned out at folks and said: “Do your worst. You can’t stop us.” But now I see, like a blast of light, that it was no such thing; but that most of them was probably good husbands and fathers, like Silas; industrious, frugal, members of the Common Councils and of the school boards, elders in the church, charitable, kindly, and believing simple as the day that what they was doing was for the good of business. Business.
“Well,” Silas was saying, “what you going to do about it?”
I looked back at Marne Holcomb standing, nervous, over by the cranberry barrel:
“I’ve got this to do about it,” I says, “and I know Mame Holcomb has, and between us we can get every woman in Friendship Village to do the same—unless it is your wife that can’t help herself like lots of women can’t: Unless you get your foot off Bitty’s neck, every last one of us will quit buying of you and go down to the Flats and trade with Bitty. How about it, Mame?”
She spoke up, like them little women do sometimes that you ain’t ever looked upon as particularly special when it comes to taking a stand.
“Why, yes,” she says. “They ain’t a woman in the village that would stand that kind of dealing, if they only knew. And we,” she adds tranquil, “could see to that.”
Silas give the date-word he was making a throw over on to the sugar barrel, and made a wild gesture with a handful of toothpicks.