“What are ye tryin’ to get through you, anyway?” demanded the first selectman.

“Hain’t your wife said northin’ about it?”

“She’s set and looked at me like I was a cake that she’d forgot in the oven,” confided the Cap’n, sullenly; “but that’s all I know about it.”

“Well, that’s about what I’ve had to stand in my fam’ly, too.  I tell ye, ye hadn’t ought to have sassed that mesmerist feller.  Oh, I heard all about it,” he cried, flapping hand of protest as the Cap’n tried to speak.  “I don’t know why you done it.  What I say is, you ought to have consulted me.  I know show people better’n you do.  Then you ain’t heard northin’ of what she said?”

“If you’ve got anything to tell me, why in the name of the three-toed Cicero don’t you tell it?” blurted the Cap’n, indignantly.

He got up and brushed the dirt off his knees.  “If there’s anything that stirs my temper, it’s this mumble-grumble, whiffle-and-hint business.  Out and open, that’s my style.”  He was reflecting testily on the peculiar reticence of his wife.

“I agree with you,” replied Hiram, calmly.  But his mind was on another phase of the question.  “If she had been out and open it wouldn’t have been so bad.  It’s this hintin’ that does the most mischief.  Give folks a hint, and a nasty imagination will do the rest.  That’s the way she’s workin’ it.”

“She?  Who?”

“Your mesmerist fellow’s runnin’ mate—­that woman that calls herself Madame Dawn, and reads the past and tells the future.”

“There ain’t nobody can do no such thing,” snapped Cap’n Sproul.  “They’re both frauds, and I didn’t want ’em in town, and I was right about it.”

“Bein’ as how I was in the show business thirty years, you needn’t feel called on to post me on fakes,” said Hiram, tartly.  “But the bigger the fake is the better it catches the crowd.  If she’d simply been an old scandal-monger at a quiltin’-bee and started a story about us, we could run down the story and run old scandal-grabber up a tree.  But when a woman goes into a trance and a sperit comes teeterin’ out from the dark behind the stage and drops a white robe over her, and she begins to occult, or whatever they call it, and speaks of them in high places, and them with fat moneybags, and that ain’t been long in our midst, and has come from no one jest knows where, and that she sees black shadders followin’ ’em, along with wimmen weepin’ and wringin’ of their hands—­well, when a woman sets on the town-hall stage and goes on in that strain for a half-hour, it ain’t the kind of a show that I want to be at—­not with my wife and yourn on the same settee with me.”

He scowled on the Cap’n’s increasing perturbation.

“A man is a darned fool to fight a polecat, Cap’n Sproul, and you ought to have known better than to let drive at him as you did.”

“She didn’t call names, did she?” asked the Cap’n.