Sally of Missouri | Page 9

in a golden monotony. At Court House Square, a few farm-teams, strapping mules and big Studebakers, stood at the hitching rail. A few people came and went up and down and across the Square. Occasionally a mean-natured man said "huh-y!" to a cow or "soo-y!" to a hog in the middle of Main Street. Some coatless clerks, with great elbow-deep sleeve protectors on their arms and large lumps of cravats at their throats, lounged in store doors. The most conspicuous, as the most institutional, feature of the landscape was the group idling on boxes in front of the old Grange store--just as they had idled on boxes before the war. They were the same men, it was the same store, and it was not inconceivable that they were the same boxes. As the men idled they spat, somewhat to the menace of the passers-by, though in defence of this avocation it may be argued that any truly agile person, by watching carefully and seizing opportunity unhesitatingly, could get by undefiled. Sometimes a vehicle rolled into the street toward the Square, and when this happened it was amusement to the men to say whose vehicle without looking up--jack-knives, watch-fobs, and other valuables occasionally changing hands on an erring guess between the slow, solemn trot of Mr. Azariah's Pringle's Bess and the duck-like waddling of Mrs. Molly Jenkins' Tom, or between the swinging canter of Miss Sally Madeira's Kentucky blacks and the running walk of the small-hoofed Texas ponies from We-all Prairie. Once a great waggon, piled high with cotton, creaked by; once a burnt-skinned boy, hard as a nut, shrieking with an irrepressible sense of being alive, loped past on a mustang. Once a small, old man, in mean clothes and with a fine bearing, crossed the Square, cracking his whip nervously, his spur clicking on his boot as he walked. Once a large florid man and a tall girl came down the street and entered the door of a two-story brick building next the Grange. The man had an expansive, blustering way. The girl looked as though she were accustomed to admire the man and to badger him; her face was turned up to his adoringly, while her fun-hunting eyes, just sheathed under her lids, gleamed gaily. The building had a plate-glass window across the front of it, and on the window, in gold letters bordered in black, two legends were flung to the public:
BANK OF CANAAN
CRITTENTON MADEIRA
When the man and the girl had gone into the Bank of Canaan, the group at the Grange stopped gambling on the incoming teams and talked less drowsily.
"Looks like that girl gets purdier and purdier."
"Mighty pleasant ways she keeps. Never gone back on her raisin'. Never got too good for Mizzourah."
"As far as I go, I like her ways better'n her pappy's ways."
"Crit is a little toploftical."
"They mighty fond of each other, though. Seems like she's not in a hurry to marry and leave her pappy."
"Wall naow, I shouldn't be s'prised ef Miss Sally never did git married, talkin' abaout marryin'. 'Twould not s'prise me a-tall, 'twouldn't." Mr. Quin Beasley was talking. Mr. Beasley was the keeper of the Grange store and admittedly a man of fine conversational powers. His jaws worked on and he seemed able to get nutriment out of his ruminations long after a cow would have gone back to grass hungrily. "Aint sayin' I never am s'prised, becuz am, but do say that that wouldn't s'prise me, an' no more would it." Mr. Beasley brought his jaws in from their loose meanderings just as the clatter of a horse's hoofs became audible down the side street that, a little way along, became the road to Poetical.
"Name the comer, Beasley. Up to the sugar-tree about now. Name-er, name-er!" The challenger took from his pocket a huge horn knife, covered it with his hand and shook it in the face of Mr. Beasley, who responsively got his hand into his pocket and drew forth a knife, which he held covered after the manner of his opponent.
"Unsight, unseen," said Mr. Beasley. "It's Price Mason's pony."
The challenger chuckled deprecatingly over the carelessness of judgment evinced: "Price Mason's pony comes down with a hippety-hop," he remarked pityingly--"lemme listen--it's--no, taint, aint favorin' his right front foot--it's--wy!" the challenger suddenly twisted his head to one side and held it there like a lean-crawed chicken deciding where to peck. Simultaneously the other men glanced down the side street where it came into the Square, and when someone said, or whistled, "Wy, who the h-e-double-l is it?" everybody was waiting for an answer.
They had not long to wait. The horseman in question galloped straight toward the group and drew rein in front of them only a few minutes later. He was a big fellow, broad and lithe of