the town, at the same hour, the paying guests of Mrs. Paynter's were
gathered about her hospitable board, plying the twin arts of supping and
talking. And as Sharlee's fellow-diners talked of Mr. Queed, it chanced
that Mr. Queed's fellow-suppers were talking of Sharlee, or at any rate
of her family's famous misfortune. Mr. Queed, it is true, did not
appreciate this fact, for the name of the female agent who had taken his
Twenty from him could not have been more unknown to him if she had been
a dweller in Phrygia or far Cappadocia.

Major Brooke told, not by request, one of his well-known stories about
how he had flouted and routed the Republicans in 1875. The plot of these
stories was always the same, but the setting shifted about here and
there, and this one had to do with a county election in which, the Major
said, the Republicans and negroes had gone the limit trying to swindle
the Democrats out of the esteemed offices.

"And I said, 'You'--the ladies will excuse me, I'm sure--'You lying
rascal,' s' I, 'don't you dare to contradict me! You're all tarred with
the same pitch,' s' I. 'Everything you touch turns corrupt and rotten.
Look at Henry G. Surface,' s' I. 'The finest fellow God ever made, till
the palsied hand of Republicanism fell upon him, and now cankering and
rotting in jail--'"

"But Henry G. Surface wasn't rotting in jail in 1875," said William
Klinker, and boldly winked at the little Doctor.

The Major, disconcerted for an instant by his anachronism, recovered
superbly. "My vision, sir, was prophetic. The stain was upon him. The
cloven foot had already been betrayed...."