City and town life -- Fiction; Love stories; Middle West -- Fiction; Political fiction
Then she began to scream at him. The old men at the checkerboard brushed
at their ears as though her screaming were a swarm of flies, harassing
them. Jim pushed her to one side and went through to the back room. When
he set about his business there, she attacked him with a billet of wood;
and Jim subdued the old warrior as gently as might be, and told her to
mind what she did. So she began to weep and wail and scream
hysterically; and Jim emptied bottles through the trap-door into the
creek, knocking off the neck of each bottle so that there might be no
survivors. All the while, Mrs. Moody wailed behind him.
When it was done, he turned to her, brushing his hands. “Orders are, no
more selling, ma’am,” he said gently. “If you start up again, I’ll have
to take you in.”
She was trying to placate him now. “Whose orders, deary?” she wheedled.
“Who’s doing this to old Mother Moody, anyhow?”
“Mayor,” Jim told her; and she wailed:
“Wint Chase. Little Wint that I’ve put to bed here amany a time. He’d
never go and do this, now. Who was it? Honest.”
“Mayor,” Jim repeated. “Straight goods. Hardiston has gone dry. This is
serious, too. Don’t you go to start anything, ma’am. Because I always
did hate to arrest a lady.”
“You’ll just have to--you might just as well take me right off to the
poor farm, Jim Radabaugh. I’m not making ends meet, even right now.” Her
withered old hands covered her face, and she rocked and wailed: “Eh,
poor old Mother Moody! Poor old Mother Moody! You wouldn’t take me in if
I sold just a little bit, would you, now?”
He said he would; and when she saw he meant it, she dropped her attempts
to conciliate him; and she cursed him through the corridor and through
the office; and she stood in the door of her hostelry and cursed him as
long as he could hear, so that even Jim Radabaugh’s hardened ears turned
red and burned with shame. It takes a brave man to face without inward
shrinking the revilements of a thoroughly angry woman. Jim was glad to
be rid of her.
He stopped, on the way back uptown, to warn a fly-by-nighter who ran a
lunch cart near the station and served stronger drinks than coffee. This
man denied any interest in Jim’s warning; and the marshal could find no
liquor about the cart. Nevertheless he served notice, and made a mental
memorandum to see to it that the notice was obeyed.
Remained only V. R. Kite. Radabaugh grinned as he thought of Kite. Kite
would take this matter hard; and when V. R. Kite took a thing hard, the
sight was worth seeing.
But Kite was not in the Bazaar when he got there, so Jim strolled back
up street and dropped in on B. B. Beecham. The editor greeted him as
courteously as he greeted every one. “Good morning,” he said. “Have a
chair. Anything I can do for you?”
Radabaugh spat into the stove. “No,” he said, readjusting the bulge in
his cheek. “Just dropped in. Waiting to see Kite.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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