A man who was humped over a sawbuck in a nearby yard straightened up and began to pay strict attention.  A driver halted a sled loaded with unshaved hoop poles, and listened.  The commercial drummer came out on the porch.

“Look here, you crazy coot, haven’t I given you fair warning about tongue-whaling me in public?” demanded the man who was pilloried.

“’Behold, all they that are incensed against thee shall be ashamed and confounded,’” quoted the Prophet, pounding his fist against the lettered breast. “’They shall be as nothing; and they that strive with thee shall perish.’”

Mr. Britt leaped off the porch, thrust the Prophet from his path, and strode across the street toward the man in the door.  The brother did not lose his smile.  He maintained his placid demeanor even when an angry finger slashed through the air close under his nose.

“I never intended to pass speech with you again, you renegade,” stormed Tasper.  “But I’m talking to-day for a town that I propose to represent in the legislature, and I won’t have it shamed any longer by a lunatic that you’re harboring.”

Usial Britt lifted his eyebrows.  “The legislature?” He puckered his lips and whistled a few bars of “Hail to the Chief.”

Candidate Britt waggled the monitory finger more energetically.  “You are sheltering and ste’boying on a crazy man who is making the rest of the people in this town crazy.  If they hadn’t grown loony they’d ride him out over the line on a rail.”

The Prophet had arrived at Britt’s shoulder. “’But God has chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.’”

“I don’t guarantee my guest’s brains,” said the Britt in the door, “but I do vouch for the correctness of his memory when it comes to the matter of Gospel quotations.  And a cracked record doesn’t always spoil a good tune.”

“I’ll have him in the lockup as a tramp, or on the poor farm as a lunatic.”

“You mean, that’s where you would have him if the shelter of my roof didn’t give him legal protection,” returned Usial, calm in the face of wrath.

“‘I was a stranger, and ye took me in,’” declaimed the Prophet.

“And I’m keeping you on,” stated the cynical Usial, speaking for his brother’s benefit, “because you’re a self-operating, red-hot gad that is helping me torment yon pirate with texts after I had run out of cuss words.  Go ahead, Prophet!  Shoot anything.  It’s a poor text that will not hit him some place.”

Obediently, the fanatic began to mouth Holy Writ in orotund.  Tasper Britt raised his fist.  But the devil himself shrinks before The Word.  Britt did not strike.  His face revealed his emotions; he could not bring himself to assault this fountain of sacred aphorisms.

He turned and marched away down the middle of the road, stamping hard into the snow.