A pen never did hang easy in the old shipmaster’s stiff fingers.  The mental travail of this unwonted literary effort wrung his brain.  An epic poet struggling with his masterpiece could not have been more rapt.  And his nerves were correspondingly touchy.  Constable Zeburee Nute, emerging at a brisk trot from the town office, had a warning word of counsel for all those intending to venture upon the first selectman’s privacy.  He delivered it at Broadway’s store.

“Talk about your r’yal Peeruvian tigers with eighteen rings on their tails!  He’s settin’ there with his hair standin’ straight up and ink on his nose and clear to his elbows, and he didn’t let me even get started in conversation.  He up and throwed three ledger-books and five sticks of wood at me, and—­so I come away,” added Mr. Nute, resignedly.  “I don’t advise nobody to go in there.”

However, the warning delivered at Broadway’s store did not reach a certain tall, thin man; for the tall, thin man stalked straight through the village and up to the door inscribed “Selectman’s Office.”  In his hand he carried a little valise about as large as a loaf of yeast bread.  The shrewish December wind snapped trousers about legs like broom-handles.  Black pads were hugged to his ears by a steel strip that curved behind his head, and he wore a hard hat that seemed merely to perch insecurely on his caput instead of fit.  Constable Nute, getting a glimpse of him through the store-window, remarked that with five minutes and a razor-strop he could put a shaving edge on the stranger’s visage, but added promptly when he saw him disappear into the town office that some one could probably get a job within the next five minutes honing the nicks out of that edge.

Cap’n Sproul was just then absorbed in a task that he hated even worse than literary composition.  He was adding figures.  They were the items for road bills, and there were at least two yards of them on sheets of paper pasted together, for nearly every voter in town was represented.  The Cap’n was half-way up one of the columns, and was exercising all his mental grip to hold on to the slowly increasing total on which he was laboriously piling units.

“I am always glad to meet a man who loves figgers,” remarked the stranger, solemnly.  He set his valise on the table and leaned over the Cap’n’s shoulder.  “I have wonderful faculty for figgers.  Give me a number and I’ll tell you the cube of it instantly, in the snap of a finger.”

Cap’n Sproul merely ground his teeth and shoved his nose closer to the paper.  He did not dare to look up.  His whole soul was centred in effort to “walk the crack” of that column.

“I could do it when I was fifteen—­and that was fifty years ago,” went on the thin man.

The enunciation of those figures nearly put the Cap’n out of commission, but with a gulp and after a mental stagger he marched on.

“Now give me figgers—­tens or hundreds,” pleaded the stranger.  “I’ll give you the cube in one second—­the snap of a finger.  Since I see you hesitate, we’ll take sixteen—­a very simple factor.  Cube it!” He clacked a bony finger into an osseous palm and cried:  “Four thousand and ninety-six!”