An interested group of men, who had bolted out of Broadway’s store, surveyed them as they passed at a brisk pace.

“By the sacred codfish!” bawled Broadway, “if that ain’t Dep Crymble!  How be ye, Dep?”

Mr. Crymble lacked either breath or amiability.  He did not reply to the friendly greeting.  Cap’n Sproul did that for him enigmatically.  “He’s back from paradise on his third furlough,” he cried.

“And bound to hell,” mourned Mr. Crymble, stumbling along before the thrust of the fist at his back.

XXVI

The Crymble place was a full half mile outside the village of Smyrna, but Cap’n Sproul and his victim covered the distance at a lively pace and swung into the yard at a dog-trot.  Batson Reeves was just blanketing his horse, for in his vigorous courtship forenoon calls figured regularly.

“My Gawd!” he gulped, fronting the Cap’n and staring at his captive with popping eyes, “I knowed ye had a turrible grudge agin’ me, Sproul, but I didn’t s’pose you’d go to op’nin’ graves to carry out your spite and bust my plans.”

“He didn’t happen to be anchored,” retorted the Cap’n, with cutting reference to the granite statue in Smyrna’s cemetery.  “Ahoy, the house, there!”

Mrs. Crymble had been hastening to the door, the sound of her suitor’s wagon-wheels summoning her.  A glimpse of the tall figure in the yard, secured past the leaves of the window geraniums, brought her out on the run.

Mrs. Delora Crymble, whose natural stock of self-reliance had been largely improved by twenty years of grass-widowhood, was not easily unnerved.

But she staggered when searching scrutiny confirmed the dreadful suspicion of that first glimpse through the geraniums.  For precaution’s sake Cap’n Sproul still held Mr. Crymble by the scrabbled cloth in the back of his coat, and that despairing individual dangled like a manikin.  But he braced his thin legs stubbornly when the Cap’n tried to push him toward the porch.

“If married couples are goin’ to act like this on judgment mornin’,” muttered the mediator, “it will kind o’ take the edge off’m the festivities.  Say, you two people, why don’t you hoorah a few times and rush up and hug and kiss and live happy ever after?”

But as soon as Mrs. Crymble could get her thin lips nipped together and her hands on her hips she pulled herself into her accustomed self-reliant poise.

“It’s you, is it, you straddled-legged, whittled-to-a-pick-ed northin’ of a clothes-pin, you?  You’ve sneaked back to sponge on me in your old age after runnin’ off and leavin’ me with a run-down farm and mortgidge!  After sendin’ me a marked copy of a paper with your death-notice, and after your will was executed on and I wore mournin’ two years and saved money out of hen profits to set a stun’ in the graveyard for you!  You mis’sable, lyin’ ‘whelp o’ Satan!”