After sitting around for awhile, and listening to the enlivened conversation, and the gossip of the neighborhood, that now circulated freely, the old man bought a package of tobacco in the store, for which he said he had “been stung ten cents,” and left us, with the overcoat, from which the cargo had been discharged, hung lightly over his arm. The assemblage gradually dispersed. Wirrick, Hyatt, and the jaundiced Viking went down to the river bank and departed in their “push boats.” Doc Dust invited Pop Wilkins to ride with him, and they betook themselves into the shadows. Tipton Posey relighted his pipe and Bill Stiles resumed the story of the horse trade. VI MUSKRAT HYATT’S REDEMPTION Except from a picturesque standpoint, “Rat” Hyatt was not an ornament to the river country. Its meager and widely scattered social life, and its average of morality, were more or less affected by his shortcomings. In many communities he would be considered an undesirable citizen. He was looked upon as a good natured “bad egg,” and as one industrious in the ways of sin by his associates at Tipton Posey’s store, but the habitues of that time honored loafing place always welcomed him, for he possessed a reminiscent talent and a peculiar kind of dry wit and repartee that helped to enliven the sleepy days. In this world much sin is forgiven an entertaining personality. There was always a feeling of incompleteness on the store platform when Rat was absent, that nobody ever admitted, but when he arrived and took his accustomed seat on the green wheel barrow, that was part of the merchandise that Posey kept outside in the day time, the depressing vacancy existed no longer. Bill Stiles’s temperamental discharges of ornate philosophy, and his comments on life’s ironies and human folly, required a target, and this was commonly the role assigned to Rat Hyatt. “I’m always the goat,” remarked Rat one hot afternoon, as we sat in the shade of the wooden awning. “W’y don’t you pick on somebody that likes to listen? I’ve been kidded by experts, an’ this long talk o’ your’n seems kind o’ mixed up. The trouble with you an’ a lot o’ the other ol’ mud birds ’round ’ere, is you open yer mouth an’ go ’way an’ leave it, an’ fergit you started it.” “Now look ’ere, Rat,” replied Bill, “you aint got no call to talk back to me. W’en I’m talkin’ to you, I aint arguin’. I’m tellin’ you how ’tis. I knowed you w’en you wasn’t knee high to a duck, an’ you aint got brains enough to have the headache with. “That feller that you sold my dog to the last time was ’ere yisterd’y askin’ ’bout you, an’ if Spot ’ad ever come back. He’d been up to your place, an’ its a good thing fer you that you an’ Spot was off some’rs in the woods. He told me what ’e traded you fer the animal, an’ I want you to bring them things to me, fer it was my dog you got ’em with.”