Smyrna gossips were beginning to comment, with more or less spite, on the sudden friendship between their first selectman and Hiram Look, since Look—­once owner of a road circus—­had retired from the road, had married his old love, and had settled down on the Snell farm.  Considering the fact that the selectman and showman had bristled at each other like game-cocks the first time they met, Smyrna wondered at the sudden effusion of affection that now kept them trotting back and forth on almost daily visits to each other.

Batson Reeves, second selectman of Smyrna, understood better than most of the others.  It was on him as a common anvil that the two of them had pounded their mutual spite cool.  Hiram, suddenly reappearing with a plug hat and a pet elephant, after twenty years of wandering, had won promptly the hand of Widow Snell, nee Amanda Purkis, whose self and whose acres Widower Reeves was just ready to annex.  And Hiram had thereby partially satisfied the old boyhood grudge planted deep in his stormy temper when Batson Reeves had broken up the early attachment between Hiram Look and Amanda Purkis.  As for First Selectman Sproul, hot in his fight with Reeves for official supremacy, his league with Hiram, after an initial combat to try spurs, was instant and cordial as soon as he had understood a few things about the showman’s character and purpose.

“Birds of a feather!” gritted Reeves, in his confidences with his intimates.  “An’ old turkle-back of a sea-capt’in runnin’ things in this town ’fore he’s been here two years, jest ’cause he’s got cheek enough and thutty thousand dollars—­and now comes that old gas-bag with a plug hat on it, braggin’ of his own thutty thousand dollars, and they hitch up!  Gawd help Smyrna, that’s all I say!”

And yet, had all the spiteful eyes in Smyrna peered around the corner of the barn on that serene June forenoon, they must have softened just a bit at sight of the placid peace of it all.

The big doors were rolled back, and “Imogene,” the ancient elephant whose fond attachment to Hiram had preserved her from the auction-block, bent her wrinkled front to the soothing sunshine and “weaved” contentedly on her slouchy legs.  She was watching her master with the thorough appreciation of one who has understood and loved the “sportin’ life.”

Hiram was in shirt-sleeves and bareheaded, his stringy hair combed over his bald spot.  His long-tailed coat and plug hat hung from a wooden peg on the side of the barn.  In front of him was a loose square of burlap, pegged to the ground at one edge, its opposite edge nailed to the barn, and sloping at an angle of forty-five degrees.

As Cap’n Sproul rounded the corner Hiram had just tossed a rooster in the air over the burlap.  The bird came down flapping its wings; its legs stuck out stiffly.  When it struck the rude net it bounded high, and came down again, and continued its grotesque hornpipe until it finally lost its spring.