He experienced a queer little sensation of alarm, a foreboding of evil. The face—that of a person he had never seen before, some one strange to Rumley—was swarthy and as clean-cut as if fashioned with a chisel. It was framed in scarlet—a bright scarlet speckled with vanishing blotches of white. He turned quickly and spoke to Sikes. “There are two women out on the porch, Joseph. Strangers. Perhaps you’d better see what they want.” “—and if Tilden _was_ elected, why in thunder did the majority of the voters of this here United States allow the Republicans to—” “—and what’s more, if Hayes wasn’t honestly elected, why did the people turn in and elect a Republican, James A. Garfield, in 1880? That’s proof enough for me—” “—Tilden had nearly half a million more votes than—” “—And if the niggers had been allowed to vote in the South—” “Oh, cheese it!” Now this undignified exclamation was not uttered by either of the arguers; nevertheless it terminated the discussion so abruptly that for a moment or two it seemed that all three had suffered a simultaneous stroke of paralysis. They turned to confront and to stare open-mouthed at the wife of the minister, who had risen and was facing them with blazing eyes. The horrified Mrs. Gooch, who had preserved a tremulous neutrality throughout the windy discussion, believed—and continued to believe to her dying day—that the brazen, overdressed young woman took the name of the Savior in vain when she gave vent to that astonishing command. (In witness whereof it is only necessary to record the declaration she made to her husband, sotto voce, a little later on: “Horace, if I live to be a thousand years old I’ll never get over the way that woman spoke the Christian name of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was positively outrageous.”) Young Mrs. Sage, having thus impulsively reverted to slang, proceeded to amplify its effectiveness. She went on: “Give us a rest, can’t you? Go chase yourselves! Where do you think you are? In a beer saloon? If you want to shoot off your mouths about—” “My _dear_ Josephine!” cried Mr. Sage, screwing up his face as if in pain. “Oh, Lord!” she breathed, staring bleakly at her husband. A close observer might have noted the sudden quivering of her lower lip, instantly lost, however, in the shamed and penitent smile that wiped away every trace of the irritation aroused by the argument. “There I go again! Backsliding almost to Grand Crossing. In another minute I would have been in Chicago. Good thing you stopped me, Herbert. And I sha’n’t in the least mind if you give me a good thrashing when you get me home. It’s the only way to break me of—” “Go for ’em—go for ’em, Mrs. Sage,” cried Mr. Baxter. “Give ’em hell! They ain’t got any right to whoop and yell like that in this house. They’ll wake the baby—if it ain’t dead—and—” “They’d wake it if it _was_ dead,” said Mrs. Grimes, coming from the kitchen at that moment with a steaming pail in her hand.