There was a box of ax-handles on display on the porch, propped up against the door jamb. As Daisy stepped upon the porch, Mrs. Crooms leaned the heavy end of one of those handles heavily upon her head. She staggered from the porch to the ground and the timid Laura, fearful of a counter-attack, struck again and Daisy toppled into the town ditch. There was not enough water in there to do more than muss her up. Every time she tried to rise, down would come that ax-handle again. Laura was fighting a scared fight. With Daisy thoroughly licked, she retired to the store porch and left her fallen enemy in the ditch. None of the men helped Daisy—even to get out of the ditch. But Elijah Moseley, who was some distance down the street when the trouble began arrived as the victor was withdrawing. He rushed up and picked Daisy out of the mud and began feeling her head.
“Is she hurt much?” Joe Clarke asked from the doorway.
“I don’t know,” Elijah answered, “I was just looking to see if Laura had been lucky enough to hit one of those nails on the head and drive it in.”
Before a week was up, Daisy moved to Orlando. There in a wider sphere, perhaps, her talents as a vamp were appreciated.
XIII
Pants and Cal’line
Sister Cal’line Potts was a silent woman. Did all of her laughing down inside, but did the thing that kept the town in an uproar of laughter. It was the general opinion of the village that Cal’line would do anything she had a mind to. And she had a mind to do several things.
Mitchell Potts, her husband, had a weakness for women. No one ever believed that she was jealous. She did things to the women, surely. But most any townsman would have said that she did them because she liked the novel situation and the queer things she could bring out of it.
Once he took up with Delphine—called Mis’ Pheeny by the town. She lived on the outskirts on the edge of the piney woods. The town winked and talked. People don’t make secrets of such things in villages. Cal’line went about her business with her thin black lips pursed tight as ever, and her shiny black eyes unchanged.
“Dat devil of a Cal’line’s got somethin’ up her sleeve!” The town smiled in anticipation.
“Delphine is too big a cigar for her to smoke. She ain’t crazy,” said some as the weeks went on and nothing happened. Even Pheeny herself would give an extra flirt to her over-starched petticoats as she rustled into church past her of Sundays.