The Skipper and the Skipped, Holman Day [book recommendations for teens TXT] 📗

what old times and old-fashioned cussin' can do for ye," declared Uncle Trufant.
A man--a short, squat man in a blue coat--came pelting down the street from the direction of the judges. It was Cap'n Aaron Sproul. People got out of his way when they got a glimpse of the fury on his face. He tore into the press of Smyrna fire-fighters, who were massed about Hecla, their faces downcast at announcement of this astonishing squirt.
"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.
A charge led by an elephant was not in the martial calculations of the Viennese. They broke and fled incontinently.
Perhaps Colonel Gideon Ward would have fled also, but the crowd that had gathered to watch the results of the hose-play was banked closely in the street.
"Make way!" bellowed Foreman Look. "There's only one man I want, and I'm goin' to have him. Keep out of my road and you won't get hurt. Now, Colonel Gideon Ward," he shouted, from his grotesque mount, as that gentleman, held at bay partly by his pride and partly by the populace, came face to face with him, "I've been in the circus business long enough to know a fake when I see one. You've been caught at it. Own up!"
The Colonel snorted indignantly and scornfully.
"You don't own up, then?" queried Hiram.
"I'll give you five minutes to stop circusin' and get your tub astraddle that reservoir," snapped the referee.
"It occurs to me," went on Hiram, "that you can spit farther if you're up a tree. We want you to do your best when you spit for us."
Colonel Ward blinked without appearing to understand.
But the foreman of the Smyrna Ancients immediately made it evident that he had evolved a peculiar method of dealing with the case in hand. He drove Imogene straight at the goggling referee.
"Up that tree!" roared Hiram. "She'll kill you if you don't."
Indeed, the elephant was brandishing her trunk in a ferocious manner. A ladder was leaning against a near-by elm, and Colonel Ward, almost under the trudging feet of the huge beast, tossed dignity to the winds. He ran up the ladder, and Imogene, responding to a cuff on her head, promptly dragged it away from the tree.
"Only three minutes left to get Hecla into position," Hiram shouted. "Referee says so. Lively with her!"
Around and around in a circle he kept Imogene shambling, driving the crowd back from the tree. The unhappy Colonel was marooned there in solitary state.
At first the Vienna company showed a hesitating inclination to interfere with the placing of Hecla, suspecting something untoward in the astonishing elevation of the referee. But even Uncle Trufant was slow to assume the responsibility of interfering with a company's right of contest.
The Ancients located their engine, coupled the hose, and ran it out with alacrity.
"Colonel Ward," shouted Hiram, "you've tried to do it, but you can't. If it's got to be dog eat dog, and no gents need apply at a firemen's muster, then here's where we have our part of the lunch. Did you measure in twenty extry feet up to your spit mark? Speak up! A quick answer turneth away the hose!"
By this time the crew was gently working the brakes of old Hecla. The hose quivered, and the four men at the nozzle felt it twitching as the water pressed at the closed valve. They were grinning, for now they realized the nature of their foreman's mode of persuasion.
Vienna realized it, too, for with a howl of protest her men came swarming into the square.
"Souse the hide off'm the red-bellied sons of Gehenna!" Hiram yelled, and the hosemen, obedient to the word, swept the hissing stream on the enemy.
Men who will face bullets will run from hornets.
Men who will charge cannon can be routed by water.
The men at the brakes of old Hecla pumped till the tub jigged on her trucks like a fantastic dancer. To right, to left, in whooshing circles, or dwelling for an instant on some particularly obstreperous Vienna man, the great stream played. Some were knocked flat, some fell and were rolled bodily out of the square by the stream, others ran wildly with their arms over their heads. The air was full of leather hats, spinning as the water struck them. Every now and then the hosemen elevated the nozzle and gave Colonel Gideon Ward his share. A half-dozen times he nearly fell off his perch and flapped out like a rag on a bush.
"It certainly ain't no place for ladies!" communed Hiram with himself, gazing abroad from his elevated position on Imogene's neck. "I thought it was once, but it ain't."
"Colonel Gideon Ward," he shouted to the limp and dripping figure in the tree, "do you own up?"
The Colonel withdrew one arm to shake his fist at the speaker, and narrowly saved himself by instantly clutching again, for the crackling stream tore at him viciously.
"We'll drownd ye where ye hang," roared the foreman of the Ancients, "before we'll let you or any other pirate rinky-dink us out of what belongs to us."
Like some Hindu magician transplanted to Yankeedom he bestrode the neck of his elephant, and with his hand summoned the waving stream to do his will. Now he directed its spitting force on the infuriated Colonel; now he put to flight some Vienna man who plucked up a little fleeting courage.
And at last Colonel Ward knuckled. There was nothing else to do.
"I made a mistake," he said, in a moment of respite from the stream.
"You spit on the paper and measured in twenty extry feet jest as Cap'n Aaron Sproul said you did," insisted Hiram. "Say that, and say it loud, or we'll give old Hecly the wickin' and blow you out of that tree."
And after ineffectual oaths the Colonel said it--said it twice, and the second time much the louder.
"Then," bellowed the triumphant Hiram, "the record of old Hecly Number One still stands, and the championship banner travels back to Smyrna with us to-night, jest as it travelled down this mornin'."
"Hain't you goin' to squirt?" asked some one posted safely behind a distant tree.
"If you'd been payin' 'tention as you ought to be you'd have jest seen us squirtin'," replied the foreman of the Ancients with quiet satire. "And when we squirt, we squirt to win."
Cap'n Aaron Sproul turned away from a rapt and lengthy survey of Colonel Ward in the tree.
"Did you ever ride on an elephant, Cap'n Sproul?" inquired Hiram.
"Never tried it," said the seaman.
"Well, I want you to come up here with me. Imogene will h'ist you. I was thinkin', as it's gettin' rather dull here in the village just now"--Hiram yawned obtrusively--"we'd go out and join the ladies. I reckon the company'd like to go along and set on the grass, and pee-ruse nature for a little while, and eat up what's left in them lunch-baskets."
Ten minutes later the Smyrna Ancients and Honorables took their departure down the street bordered by the elms. Hiram Look and Cap'n Aaron Sproul swayed comfortably on Imogene's broad back. The fife-and-drum corps followed, and behind marched the champions, dragging Hecla Number One on its ruckling trucks.
Then, with the bass drums punctuating and accenting, they sang:
"Rip-te-hoo! And a hip, hip, holler!
We'll lick hell for a half a dollar!"
And it wasn't till then that some bystander tore his attention away long enough to stick a ladder up the elm-tree and let Colonel Gideon Ward scrape his way despondently down.


XV
Probably Constable Zeburee Nute could not have picked out a moment more inauspicious for tackling First Selectman Aaron Sproul on business not immediately connected with the matter then in hand.
First Selectman Sproul was standing beside a granite post, pounding his fist on it with little regard to barked knuckles and uttering some perfectly awful profanity.
A man stood on the other side of the post, swearing with just as much gusto; the burden of his remarks being that he wasn't afraid of any by-joosly old split codfish that ever came ashore--insulting reference to Cap'n Sproul's seafaring life.
Behind Cap'n Sproul were men with pickaxes, shovels, and hoes--listening.
Behind the decrier of mariners were men with other shovels, hoes, and pickaxes--listening.
The granite post marked the town line between Smyrna and Vienna.
The post was four miles or so from Smyrna village, and Constable Nute had driven out to interview the first selectman, bringing as a passenger a slim, pale young man, who was smoking cigarettes, one after the other.
They arrived right at the climax of trouble that had been brooding sullenly for a week. In annual