“Oh, I reckon the Judge is too well fixed for _you_,” observed Avery, wagging his head. “The Willards was always wuth money--plenty of it.” Hiram did not reply. But he snorted contemptuously and his eye had a strange look of craft and secret intelligence. “S’pose your brother will be your lawyer,” suggested Avery. “Look-a-here, Figger-four,” cried the showman, “I’ve been drippin’ away to you as usual without meanin’ to say half that I have. My brother Phin has been abused by old Willard, right and left, but he has been too easy to fight back the way he ought to. I’m squarin’ things for our family in gen’ral, but it has got to be done without Phin’s knowin’ it. Do you see? I want to use you some, first and last, and you’ll get your pay, but if you say one single word to Phin about what I’m doin’, I’ll twist that other leg of yours till the joint comes behind like a cow’s hind gambrel. Me and you, and mum! You understand!” Avery apprehensively promised and escaped, evidently fearful lest more secrets were to be entrusted to him. He felt that he wasn’t capable of safely holding any more just then. But the consciousness that Hiram Look was meditating the overthrow of such a magnate as Judge Willard propped his eyes open a bit more widely as he hopped about the street, and people began to wonder why Figger-four so often caught himself up in his discourse and looked scared and hurried away. They didn’t realise how anxiously the poor sieve was struggling to hold his secrets. The constant and sulphurous threats of Hiram started the cold sweat whenever they conferred together. Day by day Avery brought new bits of information that the showman sent him to dig out of people, and day by day Hiram fitted the information, piece to piece, only himself knowing to what it all tended. He sat most of the time in the porch of the old house, smoking long cigars, the parrot occasionally croaking his familiar cry as he waddled about his cage, that was suspended from the porch roof. “My office,” Hiram called the porch. People who wanted to borrow money, old acquaintances, folks who loafed along that way to hear his stories of wanderings, came and sat on the turf of the yard or on the steps. The showman shunned Brickett’s store and the other gathering places of the village. Once, Hard-Times Wharff came up and started to have a weather-vane spell on the Look porch, but Hiram drove him away with violent contumely.