The tempestuous Hiram, with teeth set close and growling under his breath since his return from New York, was silent from motives ingrained in his showman’s temperament. The fall of Palermo’s tower of financial strength was a sensation that he was planning with as full an eye to the dramatic as he would have planned a slide for life from the peak of the round-top. “Blast him,” he muttered to Simon over and over in the moments when he “had to talk to some one or bust,” as he expressed it, “he has always put the twisters on our fam’ly before the face and eyes of the people. It’s there I’ll take him, then! I wouldn’t even joggle him now. I want him just as high on the pedestal as he can be. Not a whisper, or I’ll murder you. I want him high, I tell ye! And with these two hands I’ll push him off whilst they are all lookin’ at him. And he’ll fall a thousand miles a minute and he’ll light in a cloud of splinters that will make the sky dark. And then I’ll jump on him and crow three times and a tiger, whilst the band plays ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’” During these harangues Peak wriggled his toes in his carpet slippers and blinked appreciatively, but without venturing a word. “God!” blurted Hiram, spanking his hands upon his knees, “I’m givin’ him a taste of the ling’rin’ agony he gave my poor old father till he run him under ground. I’ve let him know just enough, Sime, to realise that I’ve got the hooks fast into him. Now let him squirm! There ain’t nothin’ that ties human natur’ into knots like bein’ sentenced and knowin’ the day set for the hangin’. Old Coll Willard knows it’s for town-meetin’ day, and that I’ve got the rope soaped for him. Let him squirm! He’s a-writin’ two letters a day to that drunk in New York and firin’ along three telegrams daily, sweatin’ blood all the time. Let him squirm! I wonder now if he can’t see in his dreams poor old Seth Look beggin’ for a little leeway on the notes the old pirate had bought up against our fam’ly. He’s been down on his knees to Phin already.” Hiram rubbed his rough palms with satisfaction. “Ain’t your brother li’ble to daub in, seein’ that him and you ain’t gittin’ along the best ever was jest now?” inquired Peak. “My brother is a fool in some directions, as I’m free to say both to him and to inquirin’ friends,” reported Hiram. “But he’s a fool only about so fur and then he stops. Don’t you set up nights worryin’ about that, Sime. Phin has got a blister or two from the Willard fam’ly lately and the swellin’ ain’t gone down yet.” After freeing his mind on such occasions as this, Hiram lighted another of his long cigars, hunched down in his chair, and perused figures in a dog’s-eared notebook with intense satisfaction. On the afternoon of the day before town meeting something that Squire Phin had been vaguely dreading happened to him.