“Gid-dap” Jones and a few citizens who could not make up their minds to go to bed till they had sucked all the sweetness out of an extraordinary evening in Egypt, were walking up and down the tavern porch, cooling off.  Mr. Britt, tramping past, shook his fist at them, too.

“Hope you enjoyed the music!” suggested Jones, wrought up to a pitch where he would not be bull-dozed even by “Phay-ray-oh.”

“Yes, and I hope we’ll have some more to-morrow night,” retorted the banker.  “You still have the poorhouse, the cattle pound, and the lockup to serenade.”

“All right!  Which one of ’em do you expect to be in?” inquired Jones.  “We wouldn’t have you miss a tune for the world!”

When Britt arrived in the shadows of his own porch he stood and looked out over Egypt and cursed the people, in detail and in toto.  He had become a monomaniac.  He had set himself to accomplish one fell purpose.

In his office, earlier that day, he had resolved upon revenge; but his natural caution had served as a leash, and he had pondered on no definite plans that might prove dangerous.  Now only one fear beset him—­the fear that he would not be able to think up and put through a sufficiently devilish program.

He banged his door behind him and lighted a lamp which he kept on a stand in the hall.  He creaked upstairs in the lonely house.  His sense of loneliness was increased when he reflected that Vona would not be at her desk in the morning.

The village watchman noted that the reflector lamp shone all night on the door of the vault in the Egypt Trust Company; it was the watchman’s business to keep track of that light.  But he noted also, outside of his regular business, that there was a light for most of the night in Tasper Britt’s bedroom.

CHAPTER X

THE MAN WHO WAS SORRY

It was a heavy dawn, next day; a thaw had set in and a drizzle of rain softened the snow; gray clouds trailed their draperies across the top of Burkett Hill.

Landlord Files had trouble in getting his kitchen fire started—­in the sluggish air the draught was bad.  Mr. Files’s spirits were as heavy as the air.  He knew it was up to him to be the first man in Egypt to come in contact with Tasper Britt that morning.

Stage-driver Jones had an early breakfast, for he had to be off with the mail.  Mr. Jones had been up late, for him, and he was grouchy.  In the matter of the warfare on Pharaoh his mood seemed to be less assertive than it had been the night before.  Mr. Files detected that much after some conversation while the breakfast was served.

“All you have to do is ‘gid-dap’ and get away,” said Files, sourly.  “I have to stay here on my job and be the first to meet him and get the brunt of the whole thing.  And I condoned, as you might say, and as he’ll probably feel.  I let my porch be used for meeting and mobbing, as you might say.  And he ketched me grinning over his shoulder when I read them heading words after that old lunkhead of a Prophet passed him the paper.”