distinction rather than assent. "But I guess it ain't original sin in the
boy. Got it from his gran'father pootty straight, I should say, and maybe
the old man had it secondhand. Ha'd to say just where so much cussedness
gits statted."

"His father's father?" asked Westover, willing to humor Whitwell's
evident wish to philosophize the Durgins' history.

"Mother's. He kept the old tavern stand on the west side of Lion's Head,
on the St. Albans Road, and I guess he kept a pootty good house in the
old times when the stages stopped with him. Ever noticed how a man on the
mean side in politics always knows how to keep a hotel? Well, it's
something curious. If there was ever a mean side to any question, old
Mason was on it. My folks used to live around there, and I can remember
when I was a boy hangin' around the bar-room nights hearin' him argue
that colored folks had no souls; and along about the time the
fugitive-slave law was passed the folks pootty near run him out o' town
for puttin' the United States marshal on the scent of a fellow that was
breakin' for Canada. Well, it was just so when the war come. It was known
for a fact that he was in with them Secesh devils up over the line that
was plannin' a raid into Vermont in '63. He'd got pootty low down by that
time; railroads took off all the travel; tavern 'd got to be a regular
doggery; old man always drank some, I guess. That was a good while after
his girl had married Durgin. He was dead against it, and it broke him up
consid'able when she would have him: Well, one night the old stand burnt
up and him in it, and neither of 'em insured."

Whitwell laughed with a pleasure in his satire which gave the monuments
in his lower jaw a rather sinister action. But, as if he felt a rebuke in
Westover's silence, he added: "There ain't anything against Mis' Durgin.