"Billy, just wait till I get the license renood, and I'll close
up this damn caff so tight they'll never know what hit her.
What did that lamb cost? Fifty cents a pound, was it? I figure it,
Billy, that every one of them hogs eats about a dollar's worth a grub
for every twenty-five cents they pay on it. As for Alf--by gosh, I'm
through with him."

But that, of course, was only a confidential matter as between Mr.
Smith and Billy.

I don't know at what precise period it was that the idea of a
petition to the License Commissioners first got about the town. No
one seemed to know just who suggested it. But certain it was that
public opinion began to swing strongly towards the support of Mr.
Smith. I think it was perhaps on the day after the big fish dinner
that Alphonse cooked for the Mariposa Canoe Club (at twenty cents a
head) that the feeling began to find open expression. People said it
was a shame that a man like Josh Smith should be run out of Mariposa
by three license commissioners. Who were the license commissioners,
anyway? Why, look at the license system they had in Sweden; yes, and
in Finland and in South America. Or, for the matter of that, look at
the French and Italians, who drink all day and all night. Aren't they
all right? Aren't they a musical people? Take Napoleon, and Victor
Hugo; drunk half the time, and yet look what they did.

I quote these arguments not for their own sake, but merely to
indicate the changing temper of public opinion in Mariposa. Men would
sit in the caff at lunch perhaps for an hour and a half and talk
about the license question in general, and then go down into the
Rats' Cooler and talk about it for two hours more.