On this occasion Foreman Look had responded nobly to the well-known gastronomic call of his Ancients.  No one understood better than he the importance of the commissary in a campaign.  The dinner he had given the Ancients to celebrate his election as foreman had shown him the way to their hearts.

Bringing up the rear had rumbled one of his circus-vans.  Now, with the eyes of the hungry multitude on him, he unlocked the doors and disclosed an interior packed full of individual lunch-baskets.  His men cheered lustily and formed in line.

Foreman Look gazed on his cohorts with pride and fondness.

“Gents,” he said, in a clarion voice that took all the bystanders into his confidence, “you’re never goin’ to make any mistake in followin’ me.  Follow me when duty calls—­follow me when pleasure speaks, and you’ll always find me with the goods.”

He waved his hand at the open door of the van.

Two ladies had been awaiting the arrival of the Ancients in the square, squired by a stout man in blue, who scruffed his fingers through his stubbly gray beard from time to time with no great ease of manner.  Most of the spectators knew him.  He was the first selectman of Smyrna, Cap’n Aaron Sproul.  And when the ladies, at a signal from Foreman Look, took stations at the van door and began to distribute the baskets, whisperings announced that they were respectively the wives of Cap’n Sproul and the foreman of Hecla One.  The ladies wore red, white, and blue aprons, and rosettes of patriotic hues, and their smiling faces indicated their zest in their duties.

Uncle Trufant, as a hound scents game, sniffed Cap’n Sproul’s uneasy rebelliousness, and seemed to know with a sixth sense that only Hiram’s most insistent appeals to his friendship, coupled with the coaxings of the women-folk, had dragged him down from Smyrna.  Uncle Trufant edged up to him and pointed wavering cane at the festive scene of distribution.

“Seems to be spendin’ his money on ’em, all free and easy, Cap’n.”

The Cap’n scowled and grunted.

“It’s good to have a lot of money like he’s got.  That’s the kind of a foreman them caterpillars is lookin’ for.  But if greenbacks growed all over him, like leaves on a tree, they’d keep at him till they’d gnawed ’em all off.”

He glowered at the briskly wagging jaws and stuffed cheeks of the feeding proteges of Foreman Look.

“I reckon he’ll wake up some day, same’s you did, and reelize what they’re tryin’ to do to him.  What you ought to done was settle in Vienny.  We’ve heard out our way how them Smyrna bloodsuckers have—­”

Cap’n Sproul whirled on the ancient detractor, whiskers bristling angrily.  He had never been backward in pointing out Smyrna’s faults.  But to have an outsider do it in the open forum of a firemen’s muster was a different matter.

“Before I started in to criticise other towns or brag about my own, Trufant,” he snorted, “I’d move over into some place where citizens like you, that’s been dead ten years and ought to be buried, ain’t walkin’ round because there ain’t soil enough left in town to bury ’em in.”  This was biting reference to Vienna’s ledgy surface.