He shook his head regretfully, and stared sorrowfully at the gutter.
“Ah, Lord, Pett! We’ve been through the mill—both of us.”
A smell of drying roots and sassafras twisted a sharp spiral from the warehouse into the thin slits of his nostrils.
“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.
