“Ye-e-aw, that’s it, and he called them ‘Signs of the Zodiac,’ Zode did. No wonder the most of ’em died young in that fam’ly! Names like them would kill yaller dogs.” “’Quar’us, ain’t you comin’ in out o’ that blaze o’ sun?” rasped Buck. “Don’t buther me when I’m prognosticatin’,” replied the stubborn meteorologist; “ain’t you gittin’ all your weather from me free--and hard times all ’round us at that--wind shiftin’s and signs and portents and all the wonders of the heavens? Then lemme alone. Kingbird chasin’ a crow,” he went on with his eye on the horizon, where the dwarf spruces bristled on Cod-Head like spikes on a huge quillpig. “And ’tain’t all weather that’s a-comin’ this way to-day.” “Spite o’ that loony streak in the Wharffses they have done some pretty tol’lable s’prisin’ things,” observed Dow Babb, untwisting his legs and reversing his clutch. “There’s somethin’ else in ’em besides that weather crack. Now, we all know here in P’ler-mo that ’Quar’us can smell a weather change quick’s a groundhog can. Born with the faculty, you might say. Takes it from old Zode, and even further back, for that matter. But him and Virgo, both of ’em, take somethin’ different than the weather streak from the mother’s side. She was old Rudd Goffses’ girl of Smyrna Mills, and old Rudd could cast a mist.” “I’ve heard he could,” vouchsafed Marriner Amazeen, striking the dottle from his clay pipe into his hard palm with a flare of sparks and preparing for a refill. “He was born with a caul, Rudd was.” “Heard that, too,” tersely agreed Amazeen. “Old Aunt Spencer ’fore she died was tellin’ my mother that the caul was just like lace, and came down all ‘round his face, and they had to untie it where it was knotted behind jest like a woman’s veil.” “Yass’r, he had the second sight and the seventh sense, and he could really magick folks, Rudd could,” Babb went on; “and there’s people alive right over in Smyrna to-day that’ll tell you what they’ve seen with their two eyes. ’Tain’t no use for us to poo-hoo things that was before our time, just ’cause we didn’t see ’em. I tell you, the old sirs could do things we couldn’t, and Rudd was one of the best o’ the lot in the magickin’ line. One day down to Smyrna, in the Guild deestrick, he cast a mist on much as a dozen people at once, and they thought they saw a Braymy rooster of old Matherson’s haulin’ off a twenty foot log up street. Whilst they was standin’ gawpin’, ’long come old Zene Sparks and says, ‘What ye standin’ here for, all on ye?’ “‘Ain’t it enough of a thing to stand around for when a rooster is haulin’ off a log like that?’ asked one o’ the crowd, pointin’ his finger. “Zeke ups and says, ‘That rooster must be owin’ all on ye money by the way you’re lookin’ at him. He ain’t doin’ anything except walk along with an oat straw hitched to his tail!’ “And that’s all there was to it, so fur’s Zene could see. The mist wasn’t cast on him, you understand, for he wasn’t there at the start-off.”