“Old Zibe Haines had a corn on his toe

And it ached like ginger ev’ry step he’d go.

He reckoned that toe had all them pains

Jest for to hector old Zibe Haines.

He grabbed up a mallet and a chisel, too,

And clear’n to the woodpile swore things blue.

He put that toe on the choppin’ block

And off he whacked it, slap, ker-chock!

And he throwed that toe ’bout ha’f a mile—

Oh, that was old Zibe Haines’s style.

Tum-diddy-dum and tum-diddy-dee,

Queer old crab was Haines, was he!”

—Narrated by Marriner Amazeen.

Squire Phineas Look, during the life of his love for Sylvena Willard, had become pretty thoroughly accustomed to having his heart affairs marked “Continued till next session,” as he half-bitterly termed it in his meditations.

Coupled with Squire Phin’s natural reserve was that quality of his trained lawyer mind that was willing to abide delays till “his case was prepared.”

In some men this would have been timidity.

In others it would have been half-heartedness.

In Squire Phin it was fixity of purpose and the steady loyalty of a firm, pure, true love that could wait.

Down in Smyrna the summer visitors still listen with mingled emotions to the story of the loves of Moses Britt and Xoa Emerson.

After they became engaged Moses worked for eight years accumulating enough money to buy three-eights of a fishing schooner. Xoa toiled at housework in various families, picked blueberries for the canning factory, and, by any employment that came to her hand, earned and saved for the little home that they had planned.

“We won’t get married till we can have our house built and furnished and ready to step into,” was the mark they had set thriftily for themselves.

The house went up, so old Mell Cowallis remarked, like the way “Figger-Four” Avery walked—steady by jerks: one year the foundation, another year the side walls and roof, a third year the chimneys and the lathing and clapboards—and so on for successive seasons, according as the fishing prospered and the work-stained fingers of Xoa tucked away the clinking change and the worn dollar bills.

Now it came to the time when Xoa resolved to fulfill the dream of her life and have a bow window of ample dimensions, the model of the one on Sheriff Morton’s big house, where she had worked for years in the kitchen, envying all the time the luxurious ease of the sheriff’s wife lolling on a divan in the window. But this window meant postponing the marriage a year, and with the house so nearly completed Moses had begun to express an entirely natural anxiety to get married.

Xoa, with the bow window filling her vision, could not understand this sudden haste in one who had been always as philosophic over delays as she herself.

“You think more of your old bow winder than you do of me,” cried Moses, in sudden jealousy. And he sailed away on a trip to the Banks, biting his stubbly gray beard in pique.

And ere one week had gone a legacy came to Xoa from her aunt Persis—just enough of a legacy to put on that bow window. So she hired carpenters in haste and set them at work, determined to have her way before the return of Moses. On one evening when the expanse of glass in that window was glowing redly in the beams of the setting sun, the “Xoa and Laura” sailed up the reach with her flag at half mast, and reported the loss of Moses Britt and his dory mate, smashed under in a fog by a roaring steamship.

Those who know say that Xoa knelt all night in her new bow window, with her face against the glass, and when morning came she called the carpenters again, and with clamour of hammers and rasp of saws they took off the bow window and boarded the side of the building up. And then—it being a case where the solemn ceremony could be deferred till all was ready—she secured a casket from the city, put into it all the pathetic old clothes that had been turned over to her with Moses’s dunnage-bag, called in the parson and the neighbours, and the funeral of Moses Britt was decorously carried out in a house upon which the soul of the bridegroom-elect could look down from on high and not take exceptions.

For forty years after that, until death took her, Xoa lived an old maid in the bow-windowless house.

It is not likely that Squire Phin Look used this case or any others similar for precedents in heart affairs, as he would have employed law-court decisions in his legal practice, but he had in his New England temperament a finer grade of the same iron-stone that is found in such dispositions as those of Moses and Xoa.

So much for the steadiness and the reserve of his affection in the past.

Since that unfortunate day in the fall there had been something else than reserve to make him walk hastily past the Willard place, to keep him away from the little social gatherings in the meeting-house vestry, and he avoided Sylvena Willard with as much anxiety as she appeared to avoid him. He was as ashamed of that blow as he would have been of a crime. Now that the rage of the provocation had departed, he knew that his act had been a vulgar street affray—there was no other word for it in his vocabulary.

When some of the jesters in the attorneys’ room at county court mentioned the affair at the December term with many humorous inquiries, he was so overwhelmed with shame that he asked continuance for most of his cases and hurried home.

Yet he heard other things at that term of court that disquieted him more.

“Why, Look, I know it!” one of his lawyer friends had insisted, when he ventured to remonstrate at certain gossip. “I don’t know how much property Judge Willard has got, nor what resources are back of him. But I do know that he is as pinched for ready money as the devil. I can talk with you without it’s going any farther; but being a trustee in a savings bank and a director in a national bank, I come pretty near knowing when a man is hustling hard for loans, and you can tell how hard he is hustling from the kind of collateral he is offering. I’ve got nothing against the Judge, but I’m afraid he’s in over his head with Bradish. Your Bradish has been a country plunger for a long time—and the country plunger is the worst of the breed. He thinks he knows it all and is working the stock market at arm’s length. I know, myself, that one bucket shop let him down for sixteen thousand in a single blind pool. Willard seems to have played fox with you folks in Palermo through it all, and, of course, he’s had a great start of you with his reputation and all that. But if he’s your town treasurer, as I hear he is, and custodian of about all the funds of widows and orphans and old codgers in your town, give him a looking over and do it right away. You can’t afford to let even a Willard dump the whole of you—especially when it looks to me as though this Bradish is the chap responsible for getting him into this mess and has gobbled most of the money.”

But even with that warning to spur him, Squire Look allowed the weeks to pass without setting about any thorough investigation of Judge Willard’s finances. If he were any other than Seth Look’s boy—-Hiram Look’s brother, he felt that the case would be different. Whenever he paused in his work to ponder on the matter and on his duty to the citizens, he groaned under his breath and put the thing away from him once more.

And as the winter went on the Squire found less and less time to think upon anything but his own matters.

The State legislature had recognised his modest but just reputation as one of the best-grounded “straight” lawyers in the State, and on the recommendation of the judges had selected him as the reviser of the statutes, a labour that he found exacting and absorbing.

Then on the heels of this work came a syndicate with a scheme for helping municipalities to instal and own their own water plants, despite the statutory restrictions that allow towns to assume so much debt and no more. The syndicate had heard of the Squire’s legal invention of “water districts” that he had studied out in the dumbly approving presence of his “Creosote Supreme Court” and expounded to the amazement of lawyers who studied for a while and then accepted.

And the syndicate would not listen to a nay and laid a certified check in his hands of a size that would have caused Asa Brickett to swoon had he realised that so large a consideration had passed over his head, and on the first warming days of March thousands of picks and shovels were ready to follow Squire Phineas Look when he had brushed away the last tangle of litigation.

Uncle Buck had passed the necessary word among the veteran loafers who used to occupy the lawyer’s shaky chairs.

“He’s busier’n a yaller dog with a tin can of snap-crackers tied to his tail, and he don’t want nobody up there unless they come on straight bus’ness.”

So all day long, whether the snow beat against the panes or the sun shone warm upon his broad back down through the bare elms, the Squire sat at his big table, his pen busy, scratchity-scratch, or his eyebrows frowning above some volume of reports, his old dog Eli curled on the dusty floor at his feet.

And the only ones who stamped up the slippery outside stairs were those who came on business.

It was on business that Judge Collamore Willard came one snowy, blowy day in March, the wind whipping his cloak about his skinny legs as he toiled up the stairs leading to Squire Phin’s office. He came in with the gust casting a last handful of snow at his back, as a roguish youth snowballs a figure that is aged and eccentric.

It was a queer figure that sat slowly down in one of the Squire’s chairs, unwrapping fold on fold of a huge shawl that was coiled about his head and long, thin neck. He had pulled the mitten from one of his hands and the gaunt phalanges looked like a bundle of reeds tied together by skin-strips. The skin was speckled with the brown spots of age and the hand fluttered as it tugged at the shawl.

The Squire put his knees against the edge of the table, sat back in his chair, and poised his pen in silent amazement for a moment. Then he pointed the pen at the stove.

“Better sit close, Judge,” he admonished. “The draughts get to sky-larking through here pretty lively on windy days.”

“I ought not to have come out this day,” said the old man querulously. “But I didn’t want to send word to you to come to my office for fear you would think it strange and not come. And I felt that I had much need to see you, Lawyer Look.”

“I would have come if you had sent word,” said the Squire, simply. He did not utter his curt “What can I do for you?” so common with him in these busy times, but looked at his visitor with inquiring gaze.

“Haven’t you got any influence or control over that fool brother of yours?” demanded the Judge, bluntly and indignantly.

“I don’t care to reply to questions of that sort put in that fashion,” returned the lawyer, knitting his brows.

Willard stared a moment into his face with its hard lines and then shifted his eyes under the steady gaze of the Squire.

“I don’t mean to be tart with you, Mr. Look,” he said, moderating his tone, “but I don’t think you ought to let your brother come into this town, after all that’s happened, and do what he is trying to do to me and mine. You’re a man of standing and I’m going to say to you that I think you are above such things.”

His apology was awkward and half-hearted.

“Aren’t you going to handle him and prevent him from making a fool of himself?”

“I don’t care to enter into any statement to you, Judge Willard, of certain family discussions that have already occurred between my brother and myself. I simply want to state for your benefit that I have no sympathy with certain movements of his. But my brother’s business is his own, Judge. He has adopted his own manner of living and occupies his own apartments at our house, and if you care to talk this matter over with him you’ll find him there at any time. I shall not interfere in his affairs.”

“I can’t talk with him,” remonstrated the old man. “There isn’t any sense in him. With him it is either a curse or a blow, and the Willard family has had enough of both from him. I have come to talk with you, Mr. Look. Whatever else I have said to you and of you, I’ll acknowledge that you are a fair man to talk with.”

The lawyer made no reply.

“I’ll say nothing to you of his under-handed tricks to interfere in my business of loans and private banking,” went on Willard, stroking his trembling hand along his withered neck. “But now he is going to mix into town politics with his brass band and his free suppers and free dances and his circus flapdoodle. It’s hurting this town, Lawyer Look, and I appeal to you as a good citizen of Palermo to pull him back and make him behave himself and not bring discredit on the place that I and mine before me have been proud of so long.” There was some dignity as well as earnest appeal in the old man’s voice.

“I understand that he has the hoodlums with him,” he went on. “He can make a lot of trouble in our town meeting this month. We have always got along so well that it will be a shame to bring uproar and contention and cheapness into our town affairs, Mr. Look.”

Delicacy of touch at critical moments was not one of Squire Phineas Look’s attributes. Now he leaned his elbows on the table, locked his fingers together, and bending toward the old man said bluntly:

“What you mean is, that it would be bad for you if you were defeated for town treasurer, after your thirty years of service, since that would mean that your books would be examined.”

He pitied Willard when he crumpled down in his chair. In the silence the lawyer had the queer thought come to him that the old man’s flabby neck-skin looked like turkey’s wattles, flushed with dull red as they were now.

“That is a cruel taunt—an unjust advantage to take of a man who has served his town so many years, Lawyer Look. I’ll own to you that I do have some pride in the fact that I have been treasurer of this town so long. I have set my heart on being reelected. It’s an old man’s whim, Mr. Look—just an old man’s whim, and it would hurt my feelings cruelly if the voters allowed your brother to work out his grudge in that way. If I could only have another year—if I——”

The lawyer, who had been steadily staring into his shifting eyes, broke in upon his faltering appeal.

“I always hate to see any living creature squirm, whether it’s an angle-worm on a hook or a man on the rack of his own conscience,” he said in his blunt, brusque manner. “I never delighted in torturing anything, Judge. This is something like killing a creature to put it out of its misery, but I’m not going to beat about the bush.”

Willard had hooked his thin hands around the rungs of his chair and was staring at the attorney with horror in his eyes.

“I know why you want to be re-elected town treasurer,” went on the Squire. “You want to cover up the fact that you’re an embezzler of almost forty thousand dollars of the town’s funds——-Oh, I know what you are going to say,” he cried, holding up his hand; “you are going to say that you’ve only hired this money on town’s notes and are going to pay it back, and that if you can be re-elected no one will be the wiser. You are begging for time, Judge. But I tell you”—he stood up and pounded the table—“you have stolen that money! You cannot pay it back. It’s no use for you to deceive me by stories. Every dollar of property you have in the world is mortgaged for every cent it is worth, and that money and the money you have stolen from this town have gone—gone down into that hole of speculation, to the side of which King Bradish led with his devilish arts and promises. You’re ruined, Judge Willard, you’re ruined—and God only knows how many other poor people you will drag down with you in this town—people whose little capital is all in your hands! I curse Bradish, first, for I believe if it hadn’t been for him no Willard would have turned out of the straight path his ancestors always followed. But I curse you, Judge Willard, for having allowed yourself to be inveigled into dishonesty and the betrayal of the great trust that has been placed in your hands. You have called me various names in the past,” he went on, his eyes flashing and the passionate anger of the Look temperament getting the better of his self-control; “I simply want to say to you now that you”—he leaned forward, supporting himself by his knuckles on the table—“are as miserable a thief as I ever knew. For when you fall—a man trusted by all—you have taken away Palermo’s strongest prop of good example from the poor, weak devils who are trying to be honest in their poverty.”

For a long time the two men looked at each other, the Squire stern and angry, the Judge writhing in his self-abasement.

Then the old man’s secret passed from his desperate clinch on it. He trembled like a leaf, but there was a certain air of relief in his confession and appeal.

“God help me, Squire,” he wailed. “No, God cannot help me. But you can. I am in awful trouble, Squire Look—awful! But it mustn’t be exposed now, it mustn’t. If I can only tide it over this town meeting I can work out of it. We got caught on the wrong side, King and I. It happened that way right along until I knew it was wrong for us to work at arm’s length from the market. But now that King is up there where he can study things, we’re coming out all right. We can’t help coming out all right. I have sat up night after night for weeks, Squire, and figured. I haven’t slept for weeks and weeks. I have raked and scraped together all I could and now we are going to win. King has it in his hands. It’s going to win, I tell you! Only help me to tide it over this town meeting, Squire. It was a mistake going into it. I realise it now. But I had to stay in. I was tied up with King. But this time we are going to win. We can’t help winning. Here’s King’s letter explaining the last deal.”

He tore at the breast of his frock coat and pulled out a crumpled envelope.

“Oh, it’s got to come out right now,” the old man mumbled on appealingly. “I have sat up nights at my desk till my eyes were almost burned out, planning and figuring. Here’s the letter, Squire. I’m going to be honest with you at last. You can help me. You’ve got to help me!”

His trembling fingers pulled the letter from the envelope, but the lawyer motioned it back.

“Excuse me, Judge,” he said, “but I don’t want to touch it. I’d rather take hold of an adder from Watson’s bog. There’s less poison in the adder. He has poisoned you through and through, Judge. I know more of King Bradish in New York than you do. I——”

“It’s your brother that has come back and lied about him!” cried the old man with reviving passion. “It’s all lies! Lies!”

“I say that I know about King Bradish,” pursued the lawyer with the calm, dispassionate tone of utter conviction. “He has become a rake, a spendthrift and a drunkard. He was all three when he lived here, but he hid his passions. He ran away because he had stolen from you and was afraid to face your ruin. He has thrown away the money you have sent to him. You have nothing to hope from him, Judge. If I am cruel I am at least honest, for now is the time for honesty. You are in an awful position. Glossing over the situation cannot help you.”

He looked with pity into the gray face of the village magnate, for he never saw anguish drawn in more agonising lines on the human countenance. Then the face puckered with the sudden emotion of an old man, wearied, driven to his last ditch and become a child again. He wept weakly, and the lawyer sat back in his chair and watched him without a word, his brows knitted in thought.

At last the old man rose and gathered his shawl about his neck. With a pitiful attempt he had regained some of the old-time dignity.

“I had no right to come to you, Mr. Look,” he said. “I didn’t realise how the interview would come out. I hoped that you would control your brother, that’s all, and give me one chance to save myself from State’s prison. I can understand perfectly why you should not be willing to help. I don’t blame you. Probably I should do the same under similar circumstances. It’s only human nature. Excuse me for giving way, but—it was pretty sudden for an old man.” His lips quivered.

The Squire overtook him at the door and led him back to his chair gently, but with a quiet decision that the Judge did not attempt to resist. Then the lawyer leaned against one corner of the table and looked down on the man before him.

“It’s bad, Judge Willard! It’s bad,” he said earnestly. “Both of us have passed our opinions of each other in the past, and it didn’t do either of us any good. Neither of us will now make any false pretences of friendship or forgiveness. We’ll leave affairs between us just as they stand. I am going to own up to you that in an investigation of the town’s affairs I shall show up badly myself, for I have been knowing to irregularities for some months and I have no explanation to offer why I did not report and interfere. It is for my interest, therefore, to attempt to arrange this matter. It is for the interest of Palermo in general to arrange it if we can. Your family has been our model of integrity for a long time. To say nothing of money loss, the showing up of this terrible thing will have an effect on morals and business confidence that our poor little town will not recover from in years. It is on my own and the people’s account that I am willing to say this to you—and that is: If it is within the power of one man to do it, I will try to avert this calamity from this town. I cannot tell you just how, for I do not know myself. I haven’t had time to think about it. It is too painful to talk about any longer now. Go home and put your affairs into such shape that I may determine your obligations and your resources.”

The Judge weakly stammered promises, explanations and appeal, and would have stayed, but the lawyer, with some impatience, helped him to tuck his shawl about his neck, handed him his cane and opened the outside door.

But he stopped him on the threshold.

“If I hear that you have sent one more dollar to Bradish or have had truck or dealing of any sort with him after this talk of ours, I’ll have no more to do with the affair. I’m not much of a man to threaten, but that’s something you can depend upon.”

The lawyer stood at his side window and watched the old man buffeting his way up the street, the corners of his shawl streaming on the wind, his slender legs quivering like reeds.

“I’d hate to be cross-examined on a witness stand as to why I made such a promise to him,” he muttered, and then he put another stick into the stove, spatted his hands, gave the old dog an affectionate cuff, and went back to his work.