The Henchman | Page 6

and tur-urn.
"Too bad the town's boom stopped short of elevators," sympathized
Shelby.
"Shouldn't use 'em, anyway," returned the widow, firmly. "They give
me a wuss turn than the stairs."
"They're trying moving stairways in some places,--a French invention, I
believe."
"Shouldn't use them contrapshuns neither. The French are a godless
people, full of vanity and all uncleanness."
Shelby's imagination balked at suggesting another alternative, and he
held his peace. The visitor's jetty eyes forsook his face and pounced
upon the clerk, who, with tongue in cheek, was filling out narrow slips
of paper at a battered table clothed in a baize of a dye traditionally held
to have been green.
"How's your ma's lumbago, Willie Irons?" she demanded.
The youth stammered a husky reply, and blushed far into his
brick-colored hair. He was of an age when a babyish diminutive
becomes a thorn unspeakable. Mrs. Weatherwax glanced tranquilly past
his writhings to the ancient table.
"Ross," she asked, "wa'n't that your grandfather's?"
"Yes. He used it in his place of business."

"I call to mind seein' it in the old distillery when I was a girl," pursued
the widow, who never called a spade an agricultural implement.
"Distillin's a wicked business."
"People thought differently about many things in my grandfather's
day."
The widow sniffed. "Wrong's wrong. Is that Seneca Bowers's roll-top
desk?"
"It was Mr. Bowers's. I bought it when we dissolved partnership."
"Law books, too?"
"Yes."
"Threw in the pictur's, I s'pose?" indicating some dingy lithographs of
political worthies past and present.
"Yes," admitted Shelby with superhuman good nature; "they came to
boot."
The widow sniffed again. "'Pears to me," said she, "you've got nothin'
new."
The man wheeled in his chair to a neighboring safe and took a
tape-bound document from a pigeon-hole.
"Shall we begin?" he asked.
"Yes--if you're so rushed," she returned, and composed her features to
fitting solemnity. As the lawyer slowly read the instrument, which he
could have rattled off from memory, Mrs. Weatherwax punctuated the
pious phrases of its exordium with approving wags. "'Frail and
transitory,'" she interpolated; "that's jest what life is. I might be took
any minute." At the reference to the payment of her lawful debts she
recovered her spirits sufficiently to put in that she did not owe a "red
cent," as everybody knew. Finally she called a halt. "Needn't go any
farther," she directed. "The first part's what I like to hear best. Exceptin'

one thing, all the rest about my green rep sofy a-goin' to Cousin Phoebe,
the pickle-caster to Brother Henry, the old dishes what can't be sold to
my beloved nephew, Jason Weatherwax, and my best tablecloths and
sheets and pillow-slips to his little Ann Eliza when she gets a husband
what's a good provider, is fixed jest as it hed ought to be. What I want
now is a postscript."
"Another codicil? Very well."
He made note of her wishes concerning a cherished feather bed which
it had struck her was too good for that "shiftless coot," Cousin Phoebe's
husband, to lie upon, and, bidding her bring her witnesses on the
morrow, bustled the will into his safe and fell upon his papers after the
manner of all lawyer kind since Chaucer's sergeant of the law who
"semed besier than he was."
The widow eyed his movements placidly.
"In a stew to hev me go?" she asked.
"Of course not," Shelby protested. "What put that in your head?"
"Your squirmin' round. Seein' I'm entirely welcome, I'll set a piece."
Shelby restrained the delight he said he felt and returned to his papers
under her relentless scrutiny.
"Telegraphs of congratulashun, I s'pose," the visitor presently observed.
"Yes; my friends are rejoicing with me."
"Everybody tickled?"
"All but the common enemy, I trust."
"I ain't hed a chance to go about much and ask," said the widow, with a
preliminary sniff; "but I've met some as wa'n't tickled or enemies
neither."

"No? Well, after all, this isn't paradise, but New York politics."
"At Tompkins's--I alluz go to him for my Oolong--I heard that Doc
Crandall won't vote for you after your dead set at the place. He's one of
your party, isn't he?"
"Yes. The doctor is one of us. Good fellow, too."
"And at Brady's, where I get my corn meal, I heard somebody say
you've got the Irish down on you."
"Oh, I hope not," returned the candidate, cheerfully. "They're a most
respectable and industrious factor in our town's life. I like the Irish."
"I s'pose."
He searched her face and concluded that her irony was unconscious;
she undeceived him.
"Butter wouldn't melt in your mouth now you're runnin' for office," she
said, laboring to her feet. "I'm s'prised you hevn't wings."
Shelby affected to relish the hoary jest, and escorted her gayly to the
door.