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“You miserable wretch! you low-down drunken sot! what do you mean by coming home and insulting your wife?” Hannah ceased shaking him from pure exhaustion.

“Where is it, I say? where is it?”

By this time she was turning his pockets wrong side out. From one she got pills, from another change, from another packages.

“The Lord be praised, and this is better luck than I hoped! Oh, elder! elder! elder! what did you do it for? Why, man, where is Balaam?”

Thought of the beast choked off the threatened hysterics.

“Balaam? Balaam?” said the elder, groggily. “He’s in town. The infernal ole fool ‘sulted me, an’ I lef’ him to walk home.”

His wife surveyed him. Really at that moment she did think his mind was gone; but the leer upon the old man’s face enraged her beyond endurance.

“You did, did you? Well, now, I reckon you’ll laugh for some cause, you will. Back you go, sir—straight back; an’ don’t you come home ‘thout that donkey, or you’ll rue it, sure as my name is Hannah Brown. Aleck!—you Aleck-k-k!”

A black boy darted round the corner, from behind which, with several others, he had beheld the brief but stirring scene.

“Put a saddle on er mule. The elder’s gwine back to town. And don’t you be long about it neither.”

“Yessum.” Aleck’s ivories gleamed in the darkness as he disappeared.

Elder Brown was soberer at that moment than he had been for hours.

“Hannah, you don’t mean it?”

“Yes, sir, I do. Back you go to town as sure as my name is Hannah
Brown.”

The elder was silent. He had never known his wife to relent on any occasion after she had affirmed her intention, supplemented with “as sure as my name is Hannah Brown.” It was her way of swearing. No affidavit would have had half the claim upon her as that simple enunciation.

So back to town went Elder Brown, not in the order of the early morn, but silently, moodily, despairingly, surrounded by mental and actual gloom.

The old man had turned a last appealing glance upon the angry woman, as he mounted with Aleck’s assistance, and sat in the light that streamed from out the kitchen window. She met the glance without a waver.

“She means it, as sure as my name is Elder Brown,” he said, thickly.
Then he rode on.

IV

To say that Elder Brown suffered on this long journey back to Macon would only mildly outline his experience. His early morning’s fall had begun to make itself felt. He was sore and uncomfortable. Besides, his stomach was empty, and called for two meals it had missed for the first time in years.

When, sore and weary, the elder entered the city, the electric lights shone above it like jewels in a crown. The city slept; that is, the better portion of it did. Here and there, however, the lower lights flashed out into the night. Moodily the elder pursued his journey, and as he rode, far off in the night there rose and quivered a plaintive cry. Elder Brown smiled wearily: it was Balaam’s appeal, and he recognized it. The animal he rode also recognized it, and replied, until the silence of the city was destroyed. The odd clamor and confusion drew from a saloon near by a group of noisy youngsters, who had been making a night of it. They surrounded Elder Brown as he began to transfer himself to the hungry beast to whose motion he was more accustomed, and in the “hail fellow well met” style of the day began to bandy jests upon his appearance. Now Elder Brown was not in a jesting humor. Positively he was in the worst humor possible. The result was that before many minutes passed the old man was swinging several of the crowd by their collars, and breaking the peace of the city. A policeman approached, and but for the good-humored party, upon whom the elder’s pluck had made a favorable impression, would have run the old man into the barracks. The crowd, however, drew him laughingly into the saloon and to the bar. The reaction was too much for his half-rallied senses. He yielded again. The reviving liquor passed his lips. Gloom vanished. He became one of the boys.