Page:Teeftallow-1926.djvu/202

bought whisky from Stegall. As for the women, they were passive, shame-faced creatures, the pursued and not the pursuing. Now for the men of Irontown to drive these women out of their homes because they themselves had enjoyed whatever poor gifts the demireps had to offer—there was something grotesque and sardonic about it. It disturbed Abner, as youth must always be disturbed until custom and wont have lent their acquiescence to the odd face of human conduct.

At times the teamster was minded to stay away from these outbursts of village morality, but there was an excitement and go about them which always sucked him in. Then, too, the raids were in perfect consonance with the run of village taste; they were of a stripe with the novels they read, the melodramas produced at the commencement exercises of the village school, with the chromos of Custer's Last Charge and of a woman in a nightgown clinging to a cross in a stormy sea, which decorated the village walls, and with the hymns about the shedding of blood which constantly resounded in the village churches. In brief, they were so exactly of a piece with Irontown culture that the wonder was not that they started but that they had not always been.

It was Abner's fortune, or misfortune, to be sufficiently sensitive to feel this jangle in the village life. At times he tried to make Nessie see his point of view.

"How can it be right," he would argue, "for the boys to buy a man's liquor during the day, not pay him fer it, an' then chase him out of town that night?"

Nessie, notwithstanding her own violation of the village code, still reflected that code with perhaps an unequalled clarity.

"Abner," she replied gravely, "two wrongs don't make a right."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Just because the boys did wrong to buy Stegall's whisky, that doesn't keep 'em from doing right by driving him out