"Your mesmerist fellow's runnin' mate--that woman that calls herself Madame Dawn, and reads the past and tells the future." "There ain't nobody can do no such thing," snapped Cap'n Sproul. "They're both frauds, and I didn't want 'em in town, and I was right about it." "Bein' as how I was in the show business thirty years, you needn't feel called on to post me on fakes," said Hiram, tartly. "But the bigger the fake is the better it catches the crowd. If she'd simply been an old scandal-monger at a quiltin'-bee and started a story about us, we could run down the story and run old scandal-grabber up a tree. But when a woman goes into a trance and a sperit comes teeterin' out from the dark behind the stage and drops a white robe over her, and she begins to occult, or whatever they call it, and speaks of them in high places, and them with fat moneybags, and that ain't been long in our midst, and has come from no one jest knows where, and that she sees black shadders followin' 'em, along with wimmen weepin' and wringin' of their hands--well, when a woman sets on the town-hall stage and goes on in that strain for a half-hour, it ain't the kind of a show that I want to be at--not with my wife and yourn on the same settee with me." He scowled on the Cap'n's increasing perturbation. "A man is a darned fool to fight a polecat, Cap'n Sproul, and you ought to have known better than to let drive at him as you did." "She didn't call names, did she?" asked the Cap'n. "Call names! Of course she didn't call names. Didn't have to. There's the difference between scandal and occultin'. We can't get no bind on her for what she said. Now here are you and me, back here to settle down after roamin' the wide world over; jest got our feet placed, as you might say, and new married to good wimmen--and because we're a little forehanded and independent, and seem to be enjoyin' life, every one is all ready to believe the worst about us on general principles. Mossbacks are always ready to believe that a man that's travelled any has been raising seventeen kinds of tophet all his life. All she had to do was go into a trance, talk a little Injun, and then hint enough to set their imaginations to workin' about us. Up to now, judgin' by the way she's been lookin' at me, my wife believes I've got seven wives strewed around the country somewhere, either alive or buried in cellars. As to your wife, you bein' a seafarin' character, she's prob'ly got it figgered that a round-up of your fam'ly circle, admittin' all that's got a claim on you, would range all the way from a Hindu to a Hottentot, and would look like a congress of nations. In about two days more--imagination still workin', and a few old she devils in this place startin' stories to help it along--our wives will be hoppin' up every ten minutes to look down the road and see if any of the victims have hove in sight. And what can we do?" Hiram lunged a vigorous kick straight before him.