Tasper Britt walked out into it from the door of Files’s tavern.

He had just been talking to the landlord about the tavern diet.  His language was vitriolic.  Even Vaniman could not have used more bitter words to express his detestation for soap as a comestible.

Britt’s heat in the matter, the manner in which he had plunged into the diatribe all of a sudden, astonished Mr. Files tremendously.  Britt seemed to be acting out a part, he was so violent.  Usually, Britt did not waste any of the heat in his cold nature unless he had a good reason for the expenditure.  There seemed to be something else than mere dyspepsia concerned, so Files thought.  He followed Mr. Britt and called to him from the door.  Britt had stopped to light his cigar.

“I’ve had my say.  I’m all done here.  Let that end it,” declared the departing guest.

There were listeners, the usual after-dinner loafers of the tavern’s purlieus.  Mr. Britt did not seem to mind them.  He even looked about, as if to make sure of their numbers.

“All you needed to do was to complain in a genteel way, and I would have been just as genteel in rectifying,” pleaded Files.

“The people of this town are still saying that I’m a hard man.  If that’s so, I’m waking up to the reason for it—­your grub has petrified me.  My real friends have noticed it.”  Here was more of Britt’s unwonted garrulity about his private concerns.  “Some of those friends have taken pity on me.  I have been invited to board with the Harnden family.”

Mr. Britt did not look around to note the effect of that piece of news.  He gazed complacently up into the sunshine.

He made quite a figure—­for Egypt—­as he stood there.  Mr. Britt had “togged out.”  His toupee, when he first flashed it, had signified much.  But the manner in which he had garbed himself for summer was little less than hardihood, considering the sort of a community in which he lived.  He was “a native.”  The style of his attire declared that he was completely indifferent to any comments by his townsmen—­and such a trait exposed in a New England village revealed more fully than his usurious habits the real callousness of the Britt nature.  There was not a man in sight who did not have patches either fore or aft, or both!  Mr. Britt wore a light, checked suit with a fitted waist, garishly yellow shoes, a puff tie of light blue, and a sailor straw with a sash band.  He was a peacock in a yard full of brown Leghorns.  But nobody laughed at Mr. Britt.  Nobody in Egypt felt like laughing at anything, any more.  They were accepting Britt, in his gorgeous plumage, as merely another strange item in the list of the signs and wonders that marked the latter days in Egypt.

More tawdry than ever appeared Prophet Elias’s robe in that sunshine, though his umbrella did seem to comport better with the season.  He stood in front of Usial’s home.  For a long time he had been keeping his tongue off the magnate of the town.  For some weeks he had been away somewhere.  To those who indulgently asked where he had been he replied tartly that he had volunteered as a scapegoat for the woes and sins of Egypt, had gone in search of a wilderness, and had come back because all other wildernesses were only second-rate affairs compared with the town from which he had started.