For the first time in their conversation Mr. Crymble dropped his meek manner. His little eyes blazed. His drooping mouth snarled and his yellow teeth showed defiantly. Cap'n Sproul always welcomed defiance. It was the thin man's passive resignation at the beginning of their acquaintance that caused the Cap'n to poke the ash-stick back under the stove. Now he buttoned his pea-jacket, pulled his hat down firmly, and spat first into one fist and then the other. "You can walk, Crymble, if you're a mind to and will go quiet," he announced, measuring the other's gaunt frame with contemptuous eye. "I'd rather for your sake that the citizens would see you walkin' up there like a man. But if you won't walk, then I'll pick you up and stick you behind my ear like a lead-pencil and take you there." "Where?" "To your house. Where else should a husband be goin' that's been gallivantin' off for twenty years?" And detecting further recalcitrancy in the face of his visitor, he pounced on him, scrabbled up a handful of cloth in the back of his coat, and propelled him out of doors and up the street. After a few protesting squawks Mr. Crymble went along. An interested group of men, who had bolted out of Broadway's store, surveyed them as they passed at a brisk pace. "By the sacred codfish!" bawled Broadway, "if that ain't Dep Crymble! How be ye, Dep?" Mr. Crymble lacked either breath or amiability. He did not reply to the friendly greeting. Cap'n Sproul did that for him enigmatically. "He's back from paradise on his third furlough," he cried. "And bound to hell," mourned Mr. Crymble, stumbling along before the thrust of the fist at his back. XXVI The Crymble place was a full half mile outside the village of Smyrna, but Cap'n Sproul and his victim covered the distance at a lively pace and swung into the yard at a dog-trot. Batson Reeves was just blanketing his horse, for in his vigorous courtship forenoon calls figured regularly. "My Gawd!" he gulped, fronting the Cap'n and staring at his captive with popping eyes, "I knowed ye had a turrible grudge agin' me, Sproul, but I didn't s'pose you'd go to op'nin' graves to carry out your spite and bust my plans." "He didn't happen to be anchored," retorted the Cap'n, with cutting reference to the granite statue in Smyrna's cemetery. "Ahoy, the house, there!" Mrs. Crymble had been hastening to the door, the sound of her suitor's wagon-wheels summoning her. A glimpse of the tall figure in the yard, secured past the leaves of the window geraniums, brought her out on the run. Mrs. Delora Crymble, whose natural stock of self-reliance had been largely improved by twenty years of grass-widowhood, was not easily unnerved.