“When the time comes to speak up for the right,” Pett announced to several of the ladies, “you’ll always find Will Gant ready to do his part.”
With far-seeing statesmanship he looked westward toward Pisgah.
“Licker,” he said, “is a curse and a care.
It has caused the sufferings of untold millions —”
“Amen, Amen,” Mrs. Tarkinton chanted softly, swaying her wide hips rhythmically.
“— it has brought poverty, disease, and suffering to hundreds of thousands of homes, broken the hearts of wives and mothers, and taken bread from the mouths of little orphaned children.”
“Amen, brother.”
“It has been,” Gant began, but at this moment his uneasy eye lighted upon the broad red face of Tim O’Doyle and the fierce whiskered whiskiness of Major Ambrose Nethersole, two prominent publicans, who were standing near the entrance not six feet away and listening attentively.
“Go on!” Major Nethersole urged, with the deep chest notes of a bullfrog.
“Go on, W.
O., but for God’s sake, don’t belch!”
“Begod!” said Tim O’Doyle, wiping a tiny rill of tobacco juice from the thick simian corner of his mouth,
“I’ve seen him start for the door and step through the windey.
When we see him coming we hire two extra bottle openers.
He used to give the barman a bonus to get up early.”
“Pay no attention to them, ladies, I beg of you,” said Gant scathingly.
“They are the lowest of the low, the whisky-besotted dregs of humanity, who deserve to bear not even the name of men, so far have they retrograded backwards.”
With a flourishing sweep of his slouch hat he departed into the warehouse.
“By God!” said Ambrose Nethersole approvingly.
“It takes W.
O. to tie a knot in the tail of the English language. It always did.”
But within two months he moaned bitterly his unwetted thirst.
For several years he ordered, from time to time, the alloted quota — a gallon of whisky every two weeks — from Baltimore.
It was the day of the blind tiger.
The town was mined thickly with them.
Bad rye and moonshine corn were the prevailing beverages.
He grew old, he was sick, he still drank.
A slow trickle of lust crawled painfully down the parched gulley of desire, and ended feebly in dry fumbling lechery.
He made pretty young summer widows at Dixieland presents of money, underwear, and silk stockings, which he drew on over their shapely legs in the dusty gloom of his little office.
Smiling with imperturbable tenderness, Mrs. Selborne thrust out her heavy legs slowly to swell with warm ripe smack his gift of flowered green-silk garters.
Wetting his thumb with sly thin aftersmile, he told.
A grass widow, forty-nine, with piled hair of dyed henna, corseted breasts and hips architecturally protuberant in a sharp diagonal, meaty mottled arms, and a gulched face of leaden flaccidity puttied up brightly with cosmetics, rented the upstairs of Woodson Street while Helen was absent.
“She looks like an adventuress, hey?” said Gant hopefully.
She had a son.
He was fourteen, with a round olive face, a soft white body, and thin legs.
He bit his nails intently.
His hair and eyes were dark, his face full of sad stealth.
He was wise and made himself unobtrusively scarce at proper times.
Gant came home earlier.
The widow rocked brightly on the porch.
He bowed sweepingly, calling her Madam.
Coy-kittenish, she talked down at him, slogged against the creaking stair rail.
She leered cosily at him.
She came and went freely through his sitting-room, where he now slept.
One evening, just after he had entered, she came in from the bathroom, scented lightly with the best soap, and beefily moulded into a flame-red kimono.
A handsome woman yet, he thought.
Good evening, madam.
He got up from his rocker, put aside the crackling sheets of the evening paper (Republican), and undipped his steel-rimmed glasses from the great blade of his nose.
She came over with sprightly gait to the empty hearth, clasping her wrapper tightly with veinous hands.
Swiftly, with a gay leer, she opened the garment, disclosing her thin legs, silkshod, and her lumpy hips, gaudily clothed in ruffled drawers of blue silk.