“A hunderd and seventeen northin’!  A hunderd and seventeen northin’!” Cap’n Sproul gasped over and over.  “I knowed he was in to do us!  I see him do it!  It wa’n’t no hunderd and seventeen!  It’s a fraud!”

“You’re a liar!” cried Uncle Trufant, promptly.  But the Cap’n refused to be diverted into argument.

“I went up there to watch Gid Ward, and I watched him,” he informed the Ancients.  “The rest of ’em was watchin’ the squirt, but I was watchin’ that land-pirut.  I see him spit on that paper twenty feet further’n the furthest drop of water, and then he measured from that spit.  That’s the kind of a man that’s refereein’ this thing.  He’s here to do us!  He’s paying off his old town-meetin’ grudge!”

“Oh, I can’t think that of my brother!” cried the Cap’n’s wife.

“Remember, Hiram, that you’ve agreed—­” began the cautious spouse of the foreman, noting with alarm the rigid lines beginning to crease her husband’s face.

“There ain’t no mistake about his measurin’ to that spit?” demanded Hiram of the Cap’n, in the level tones of one already convinced but willing to give the accused one a last chance.

“He done it—­I swear he done it.”

“I’d thought,” pursued the foreman of the Ancients, “that a firemen’s muster could be made genteel, and would make a pleasant little trip for the ladies.  I was mistaken.”  At the look in his eyes his wife began eager appeal, but he simply picked her up and placed her in the van from which the lunch-baskets had been taken.  “There’s Mis’ Look,” he said to the Cap’n.  “She’ll be glad to have the company of Mis’ Sproul.”

Without a word the Cap’n picked up Louada Murilla and placed her beside the half-fainting Mrs. Look.  Hiram closed the doors of the van.

“Drive out about two miles,” he ordered the man on the box, “and then let the ladies git out and pick bokays and enjoy nature for the rest of the afternoon.  It’s—­it’s—­apt to be kind of stuffy here in the village.”

And the van rumbled away down the street toward the vista framed in the drooping elms.

“Now, gents,” said Hiram to his men, “if this is a spittin’-at-a-crack contest instead of a tub-squirt, I reckon we’d better go to headquarters and find out about it.”

But at Smyrna’s announced determination to raid the referee, Vienna massed itself in the way.  It began to look like the good old times, and the spectators started a hasty rush to withdraw from the scene.

But Vienna was too openly eager for pitched battle.

To stop then and give them what they had been soliciting all day seemed too much like gracious accommodation in the view of Foreman Look.  His business just at that moment was with Colonel Gideon Ward, and he promptly thought of a way to get to him.

At a signal the intelligent Imogene hooped her trunk about him and hoisted him to her neck.  Then she started up the street, brandishing the trunk before her like a policeman’s billy and “roomping” in hoarse warning to those who encumbered her path.