"The whole trouble," argued another, "is just women's imagination, that's all. I never saw a woman that had a living father, brother, beau, husband, brother-in-law, father-in-law, cousin or boy baby in arms that she wasn't worrying all the time night and day that drink'd get him. It's just their way of being foolish, that's all. And as for all this talk about the terrible danger and it being a menace to the future generation, that's all slop and slush." Billy was irritable this morning for the first time in months. It must be remembered that Billy's wife was red-headed and a highly efficient soul. She had very frankly and plainly told Billy what she thought of a town that was run in so slack a fashion that it couldn't protect one of its own lovable citizens. She had never spoken so sharply in all their days together and Billy felt that he had lost his bride forever. And he had. "Well--boys, I'll tell you," sighed Billy. "The old woman gave me hell, I tell you--as if--great gosh, it was all my fault. The women are partly right and we all know it. That's why they talk up so and why we have to take it. I've about come to the conclusion that as long as the women are partly right and we are partly wrong I'm going to quit it, as far as I myself am concerned. But don't think for one minute that I fancy that I have a right to vote this town dry for any other man. Live and let live's my way of thinking and doing." "Well, Billy," spoke up Jake Tuttle who had come out strongly for a dry town, a dry state and a dry country, "you're fair and square and a-doing all you honestly can. Maybe the time will come when you'll feel that voting it out is the only thing." "Why," grumbled another member of this caucus, "anybody'd think that this whole town had ought to turn in and just die of thirst on account of a man that ain't much bigger than a pint of cider and never did have no proper stomach. Why, who ever heard of sech a thing as a whole town being run for one man?" "A town that ain't run fair and square for one man isn't run fair and square for any man," insisted Jake. "And as for hearing strange things, I've heerd tell of a man once, a poor kind of low-style Jew he was, lived over in a little two by four town called Nazareth, who not only believed in going dry and hungry for other people but actually died so's to show them a finer way of living and a braver way of dying. I've heerd tell that they called that man the Greatest Fool that ever lived and that they killed Him fur His foolishness. So, if this whole town should turn in an' help Jim Tumley there'd be nothing new in that." The pause that followed would have been uncomfortable if Seth Curtis hadn't opened the door just then and squeezed in.