They
didn't look so bad, either, so I saw my crooked work had done some good.
Lon quit singing almost at once and walked good and his eyes didn't
wabble, and he looked kind of desperate and respectable, and Ben was
first-class, except he was slightly oratorical and his collar had melted
the way fat men's do. And it was funny to see how every husband there
bucked up when Ben came forward, as if all they had wanted was some one
to make medicine for 'em before they begun the war dance. They mooched
right up round Ben when he trampled a way into the flushed group about
Wilfred.
"'At last the well-known stranger!' says Ben cordially, seizing one of
Wilfred's pale, beautiful hands. 'I've been hearing so much of you,
wayward child of the open road that you are, and I've just been reading
your wonderful verses as I sat in my library. The woods and the hills
for your spirit untamed and the fire of youth to warm your
nights--that's the talk.' He paused and waved Wilfred's verses in a fat,
freckled hand. Then he looked at him hard and peculiar and says: 'When
you going to pull some of it for us?'
"Wilfred had looked slightly rattled from the beginning.
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