Mose, like many of us, was a self-centered individual.  He wasted a minute, perhaps, thinking of the trick upon Ford; but he spent all of that forenoon and well into the afternoon in deep meditation upon the affair as it concerned himself.  And the first time Dick entered the presence of the cook, he got the result of Mose’s reasoning.

“Tried to git me in bad, did yuh?  Thought you’d git me fired, hey?” he shouted, as a sort of punctuation to the belaboring.

A rolling pin is considered a more or less fearsome weapon in the hands of a woman, I believe; when wielded by an incensed man who stands close to six feet and weighs a solid two hundred pounds, and who has the headache which follows inevitably in the wake of three pints of whisky administered internally in the short space of three hours or so, a rolling-pin should justly be classed with deadly weapons.

Jim said afterward that he never had believed it possible to act out the rough stuff of the silly supplements in the Sunday papers, but after seeing Mose perform with that rolling-pin, he was willing to call every edition of the “funny papers” realistic to a degree.  Since it was Jim who helped pull Mose off, naturally he felt qualified to judge.  Jim told Ford about the affair with sober face and eyes that laughed.

“And where’s Dick?” Ford asked him, without committing himself upon the justice of the chastisement.

“Gone to bed, I believe.  He didn’t come out with anything worse than bumps, I guess—­but what I saw of them are sure peaches; or maybe Italian prunes would hit them off closer; they’re a fine purple shade.  I ladled Three H all over him.”

“I thought Dick was a fighter from Fighterville,” grinned Ford, trying hard to remain non-committal and making a poor job of it.

“Well, he is, when he can stand up and box according to rule, or hit a man when he isn’t looking.  But my, oh!  This wasn’t a fight, Ford; this was like the pictures you see of an old woman lambasting her son-in-law with an umbrella.  Dick never got a chance to begin.  Whee-ee!  Mose sure can handle a rolling-pin some!”

Ford laughed and went up to the house to his supper, and to the constrained atmosphere which was telling on his nerves more severely than did the gallon jug in his closet, and the moral effort it cost to keep that jug full to the neck.

He went in quietly, threw his hat on the bed, and sat down with an air of discouragement.  It was not yet six o’clock, and he knew that Mrs. Kate would not have supper ready; but he wanted a quiet place in which to think, and he was closer to Josephine; though he would never have admitted to himself that her nearness was any comfort to him.  He did admit, however, that the jug with the brown neck and handle pulled him to the room many times in spite of himself.  He would take it from the corner of the closet and let his fingers close over the cork, but so far he had never yielded beyond that point.  Always he had been able to set the jug back unopened.