"Was that all you did?"
"What else could I do?" demanded Mr. Loop in some surprise.
"Why, you could have tackled him right then an" there, couldn"t you?"
"Didn"t I tell you there was two of "em?"
"Two men?"
"No. Him an" Anna. You don"t suppose I could lick _both_ of "em, do you?
I bet there ain"t a man in town--"cept that blacksmith, Bill Kepsal--that c"n lick Anna single-handed. Besides, I ain"t half the man I used to be. I"m purty nigh eighty, Anderson. If I"d been four or five years younger, I"d ha" showed him, you bet."
"Umph!" was Mr. Crow"s comment. "How long did they set there?"
"I can"t just perzactly say. They was gone when I woke up!"
"When you what?"
"Woke up. It was gittin" purty late, long past my bedtime, an" I"d had a hard day"s work. I guess I muster fell asleep."
"Was Mrs. Loop up when you got back home?"
"Yes, she was up."
"What did you say to her?"
"I--I didn"t git a chance to say anything," said Eliphalet mournfully.
"All three of "em was eatin" breakfast, an" I got the most awful tongue-lashin" you ever heard. "Cused me of everything under the sun. I couldn"t eat a mouthful."
"Served you right," said Anderson sternly. "Well, did you ever see him ag"in?"
"I ain"t sayin" as it was the same feller," qualified Mr. Loop, "but last night I seen a man streakin" through the potato-patch lickety-split some"eres round nine o"clock. He was carryin" a bundle an" was all stooped over. I yelled at him to stop er I"d fire. That seemed to make him run a little faster, so I took after him, an" run smack into Anna comin" round the corner of the hen-roost. Soon as I got my breath, I asked her what in tarnation she was doin" out at that time o" night."
"Well, go on. What did she say?" demanded Anderson as Mr. Loop paused to wipe his forehead.
"She--she insulted me," said Mr. Loop.
"How?" inquired Marshal Crow sceptically.
"She called me a skunk."
Mr. Crow was silent for some time, tugging at his whiskers. He stared intently at the upper corner of Dr. Brown"s cottage. His lip twitched slightly. Presently, feeling that he could trust his voice, he asked:
"Why don"t you offer a reward, Liff?"
"I thought of doin" that," said Mr. Loop, but a trifle half-heartedly.
"If you offer a big enough reward, I"ll find out who the feller is,"
said Anderson. "Course, you understand it ain"t my duty as marshal to ferret out matrimonial mysteries. I"d have to tackle it in my capacity as a private detective. An" you couldn"t hardly expect me to do all this extry work without bein" paid fer it."
Mr. Loop scratched his head. Then he scratched a small furrow in the gravel roadway with the toe of one of his boots.
"Well, you see, I got to pay a lawyer right smart of a fee; an"
besides--"
Anderson interrupted him sternly. "You owe it to your feller-citizens to clear up this mystery. You surely don"t think it is fair to your friends, do you, "Liphalet Loop? Purty nigh every man in town is bein"
suspicioned, an"--"
"That ain"t any business o" mine," snapped Eliphalet, showing some ire.
"If they feel as though the thing ought to be cleared up jest fer _their_ sakes, why don"t they git together an" offer a reward? I don"t see why I ought to pay out money to "stablish the innocence of all the men in Tinkletown. Let them do it if they feel that way about it. I got no objection to the taxpayers of Tinkletown oppropriatin" a sum out of the town treasury to prove they"re innocent. Why don"t you take it up with the selectmen, Anderson. I"m satisfied to leave my complaint as it is. I"ve been thinkin" it over, an" I believe I"d ruther git my divorce without knowin" who"s the cause of it. The way it is now, I"m on friendly terms with every man in town, an" I"d like to stay that way. It would be mighty onpleasant to meet one of your friends on the street an"
not be able to speak to him. Long as I _don"t_ know, why--"
"Wait a minute, Liff Loop," broke in Anderson sternly. "Don"t say anything more. All I got to say is that it wasn"t _you_ your wife insulted when she called you a skunk. Good mornin", sir."
He turned and strode away, leaving the amazed Mr. Loop standing with his mouth open. Some time later that same afternoon Eliphalet succeeded in solving the problem that had been tantalizing him all day. "By gum," he bleated, addressing the high heavens, "what a blamed old fool he is!
Anybody with any sense at all knows that you _can"t_ insult a skunk."
Briefly, Mr. Loop"s fifth matrimonial experience had been, in the strictest sense, a venture. After four discouraging failures in the effort to obtain a durable wife from among the young women of Tinkletown and vicinity, he had resolved to go farther afield for his fifth. So he advertised through a New York matrimonial bureau for the sort of wife he might reasonably depend upon to survive the rigours of climate, industry and thrift. He made it quite plain that the lucky applicant would have to be a robust creature, white, sound of lung and limb, not more than thirty, and experienced in domestic economy. Nationality no object. Mr.
Loop"s idea of the meaning of domestic economy was intensely literal.
Also she would have to pay her own railroad fare to Boggs City, no matter whence she came, the same to be refunded in case she proved acceptable. He described himself as a widower of means, young in spirit though somewhat past middle age, of attractive personality and an experienced husband.
The present Mrs. Loop was the result of this spirit of enterprise on his part. She came from Hoboken, New Jersey, and her name was Anna Petersen before it was altered to Loop. She more than fulfilled the requirements.
As Mr. Loop himself proclaimed, there wasn"t "a robuster woman in Bramble County;" she was exceedingly sound of lung, and equally sound of limb. What pleased him more than anything else, she was a Swede. He had always heard that the Swedish women were the most frugal, the most industrious, and a shade more amenable to male authority than any others.
Anna was a towering, rather overdeveloped female. She revealed such astonishing propensities for work that she had been a bride but little more than a week when Eliphalet decided that he could dispense with the services of a hired man. A little later he discovered, much to his surprise, that there really wasn"t quite enough work about the house to keep her occupied all the time, and so he allowed her to take over some of the ch.o.r.es he had been in the habit of performing, such as feeding the horses and pigs, and ultimately to chop and carry in the firewood, wash the buckboard, milk the cows, and--in spare moments--to weed the garden. He began to regard himself as the most fortunate man alive. Anna appeared to thrive where her predecessors had withered and wasted away.
True, she ate considerably more than any of them, but he was willing to put up with that, provided she didn"t go so far to eat as much as _all_ of them. There were times, however, when he experienced a great deal of uneasiness on that score.
The fly avoided his ointment for something like three months. Then it came and settled and bade fair to remain and thrive upon the fat of his land. Anna"s mother came to live with them. He now realized that he had been extremely shortsighted. He should have stipulated in his advertis.e.m.e.nt that none except motherless young women need apply.
Mrs. Petersen was his fifth mother-in-law, and he dolefully found himself contending with the paraphrase: like mother, like daughter. His latest mother-in-law proved to be a voracious as well as a vociferous eater. She fell little short of Anna in physical proportions, but his wife a.s.sured him that it would be no time at all before she"d have her as plump as a partridge! Mr. Loop undertook the experiment of a joke. He asked her if _partridge_ was the Swede word for _hippopotamus_. After that he kept his jokes to himself.
A year and a half went by. Then Miss Gertie Petersen came up from Hoboken for a flying visit. She was a very tall and lean young woman.
Mr. Loop shuddered. The process of developing her into a partridge was something horrible to contemplate. But Anna was not dismayed. She insisted that the country air would do her sister a world of good. Mr.
Loop was a pained witness to the filling out of Gertrude, but something told him that it wasn"t the country air that was doing it. She weighed in the neighbourhood of one hundred and fifty pounds when she flew in for the visit. At the end of six months she strained the scales at two hundred and twenty. There was a good deal of horse-sense in his contention that if all this additional weight was country air, she"d have to be pretty securely anch.o.r.ed or she"d float away like a balloon.
But he did not openly complain. He had acquired the wisdom of the vanquished. He was surrounded by conquerors. Moreover, at butchering-time, he had seen his wife pick up a squealing shoat with one hand and slit its throat with the other in such a skilful and efficient manner that gooseflesh crept out all over his body when he thought of it.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _He was surrounded by conquerors_]
And during those long, solitary nights in the barn he thought of it so constantly that everything else, including the encroachment of the home-wrecker, slipped his mind completely. He never ceased wondering how he screwed up the courage to inst.i.tute proceedings against Anna, notwithstanding the fact that the matter had been vicariously attended to by his lawyer and a deputy from the county sheriff"s office.
Marshal Crow fell into a state of profound cogitation after leaving Mr.
Loop. The old man had put a new idea into his head. Late in the afternoon he decided to call a meeting of citizens at the town hall for that night. He drafted the a.s.sistance of such able idlers as Alf Reesling, Newt Spratt, Rush Applegate, Henry Plumb and Situate M. Jones, and ordered them to impress upon all male citizens of Tinkletown between the ages of twenty-one and seventy-five the importance of attending this meeting. Ebenezer January, the barber, and George Washington Smith, the garbage-wagon driver, were the only two men in town whose presence was not considered necessary. They, with their somewhat extensive families, represented the total coloured population of Tinkletown.