“Strip of veneer showed it. Slice of plug was still stickin’ in. And we went over a dozen more bolts with a fine-tooth comb. We found one with a spot in it that looked suspicious. Dug it out and it was a plug! And we notched in and hit the nail. Now what does that mean?”
“It means you’re to keep your mouth shut about it, and tell some kind of a story to your gang to keep their mouths shut.”
“Somebody’s goin’ to get hurt,” Watson said, darkly.
“Yes,” said Jim, slowly, “somebody is going to get hurt—bad.”
“I s’pose I’ll have to look over every bolt with opery-glasses,” growled Watson.
“I’ll give you a man who is to do nothing else. Tell Beam I said so.”
Jim put on his coat and hat and went to dinner. His physical machine was such that it required nourishment, no matter what was happening to the mental department. Some men lose their appetites when things go wrong. Not so Jim Ashe. Some men drown their troubles in drink. Jim had his drowned three times daily in hunger.
When he had eaten his dinner—for the Widow Stickney had only vaguely heard of a strange custom of moving that meal along till six o’clock and having a thing at noon called luncheon; to her, luncheon was something you put up in a basket and took to a picnic—he leaned back in his chair for his usual midday chat with the old lady.
“You ought to be pretty well acquainted with folks hereabout.”
“Don’t have to live here long to be that. Everybody you meet is boilin’ over with anxiety to give you the true life history of everybody else. You kin git to know Diversity consid’able well in a week, if you’re willin’ to listen.”
“Justice Frame’s lived here a long time, too, hasn’t he?”
“Mrs. Stickney, I’m not asking this wholly out of curiosity. I’m new to you all. I’ve got my hands pretty full, and there are people in the world who would be glad to see me spill part of my load. It’s a fine thing to know whom you can depend on and whom you want to shy at. So I’m asking you to tell me something about Zaanan Frame.”
“He’s a stiff-spined old grampus,” said the widow, promptly. “Him and me squabbles so’s the neighbors ’most come a-runnin’ in to part us. He’s powerful set on havin’ his own way—and mostly he gits it. He’s sharper ’n a new sickle. He’s been justice of the peace here since before Mary Whittaker was born, and Mary’s got a boy of ten herself. Hain’t never been nothin’ more ’n just justice of the peace, but he runs the whole blessed county out of his office. He’s one of them things the papers call a political boss; but if I do say it, Zaanan Frame does a good job of it. But he runs it so folks git the wuth of their taxes, and so that them that wants justice gits it.