“Well, you look at him!” shouted Hiram, slapping his breast.  He noted a look of alarm on the Cap’n’s face, and muttered to him under his breath:  “You ain’t goin’ to let a pack of wimmen back ye down, be ye?”

“How be we goin’ to work to run it?” whispered the Cap’n.

“That ain’t the p’int now,” growled Hiram.  “The p’int is, we’re goin’ to run it.  And you’ve got to back me up.”

“Hiram!” called his wife, appealingly, but he had no ears for her.

“You’ve made your threats,” he stormed, addressing the leader of the Workers.  “You haven’t talked to us as gents ought to be talked to.  You haven’t made any allowances.  You haven’t shown any charity.  You’ve just got up and tried to jam us to the wall.  Now, seein’ that your business is done here, and that this tavern is under new management, you’ll be excused to go over and start your own place.”

He opened the door and bowed, and the women, noting determination in his eyes, began to murmur, to sniff spitefully, and to jostle slowly out.  Mrs. Look and Mrs. Sproul showed some signs of lingering, but Hiram suggested dryly that they’d better stick with the band.

“We’ll be man and wife up home,” he said, “and no twits and no hard feelin’s.  But just now you are Double-yer T. Double-yers and we are tavern-keepers—­and we don’t hitch.”  They went.

“Now, Nute,” barked Hiram, when the constable lingered as though rather ashamed to depart with the women, “you get out of here and you stay out, or I’ll cook that stuffed alligator and a few others of these tangdoodiaps here and ram ’em down them old jaws of yours.”  Therefore, Constable Nute went, too.

XXVIII

Moved by mutual impulse, Hiram and the Cap’n plodded through the deserted tavern, up-stairs and down-stairs.  When they went into the kitchen the two hired girls were dragging their trunks to the door, and scornfully resisted all appeals to remain.  They said it was a nasty rum-hole, and that they had reputations to preserve just as well as some folks who thought they were better because they had money.  Fine hand of the W.T.W.’s shown thus early in the game of tavern-keeping!  There were even dirty dishes in the sink, so precipitate was the departure.

In the stable, the hostler, a one-eyed servitor, with the piping voice, wobbly gait, and shrunken features of the “white drunkard,” was in his usual sociable state of intoxication, and declared that he would stick by them.  He testified slobberingly as to his devotion to Mr. Parrott, declared that when the women descended Mr. Parrott confided to him the delicate task of “hiding the stuff,” and that he had managed to conceal quite a lot of it.

“Well, dig it up and throw it away,” directed Hiram.

“Oh, only a fool in the business buries rum,” confided the hostler.  “I’ve been in the rum business, and I know.  They allus hunts haymows and sullers.  But I know how to hide it.  I’m shrewd about them things.”