And as he pondered, Hiram Look broke in with a word.

“I know it looks suspicious, comin’ from a Reeves,” said he, “but I hardly see anything about it to start your temper so, Cap.”

“Why, he might just as well have sent me a writin’ to go out and take a census of the hossflies between here and the Vienny town-line,” sputtered the first selectman; “or catch the moskeeters in Snell’s bog and paint ’em red, white, and blue.  I tell you, it’s a dirty, sneakin’, underhand way of gettin’ me laughed at.”

“I ain’t a humorous man myself, and there ain’t no—­” began Mr. Gammon.

“Shut up!” bellowed the Cap’n.  “It was only last week, Hiram, that that old gob of cat-meat over there that calls himself a lawyer said I’d taken this job of selectman as a license to stick my nose into everybody’s business in town.  Now, here he is, rigging me out with a balloon-jib and stays’ls”—­he pointed a quivering finger at the paper that Mr. Gammon was nursing—­“and sendin’ me off on a tack that will pile me up on Fool Rocks.  Everybody can say it of me, then—­that I’m stickin’ my nose in.  Because there ain’t any witches, and never was any witches.”

“Ain’t witches?” squealed Mr. Gammon.  “Why, you—­”

But Hiram checked the outburst with flapping palm.

“Here!” he cried.  “The two of you wait just a minute.  Keep right still until I come back.  Don’t say a word to each other.  It will only be wasting breath.”

He went out, and they heard him clumping up the stairs into the upper part of the town house.

He came back with several books in the hook of his arm and found the two mute and not amiable.  He surveyed them patronizingly, after he had placed the books on the table.

“Gents, once when I was considerably younger and consequently reckoned that I knew about all there was to know, not only all the main points, but all the foot-notes, I didn’t allow anybody else to know anything.  And I used to lose more or less money betting that this and that wasn’t so.  Then up would come the fellow with the cyclopedy and his facts and his figgers.  At last I was so sure of one thing that I bet a thousand on it, and a fellow hit me over the head with every cyclopedy printed since the time Noah waited for the mud to dry.  I got my lesson!  After that I took my tip from the men that have spent time findin’ out.  I’m more or less of a fool now, but before that I was such a fool that I didn’t know that I didn’t know enough to know that I didn’t know.”

“What did you bet on?” inquired the Cap’n, with a gleam of interest.

“None of your business!” snapped Hiram, a red flush on his cheek.  “But if I’d paid more attention to geography in my school than I did to tamin’ toads and playin’ circus I wouldn’t have bet.”

He opened one of the books that he had secured in his trip to the town library.

“Now, you say offhand, Cap, that there never was such a thing as a witch.  Well, right here are the figgers to show that between 1482 and 1784 more than three hundred thousand wimmen were put to death in Europe for bein’ witches.  There’s the facts under ‘Witches’ in your own town cyclopedy.”