“Then I wish you’d p’int it out,” said Buckalew, “if you’ve got either.”

“By the Almighty, Squire”—­Mr. Arp turned in his chair with sudden heat—­“if I’d lived as long as you—­”

“You have,” interrupted the other, stung.  “Twelve years ago!”

“If I’d lived as long as you,” Mr. Arp repeated, unwincingly, in a louder voice, “and had follered Satan’s trail as long as you have, and yet couldn’t recognize it when I see it, I’d git converted and vote Prohibitionist.”

“I don’t see it,” interjected Uncle Joe Davey, in his querulous voice. (He was the patriarch of them all.) “I can’t find no cloven-hoof-prints in the snow.”

“All over it, sir!” cried the cynic.  “All over it!  Old Satan loves tricks like this.  Here’s a town that’s jest one squirmin’ mass of lies and envy and vice and wickedness and corruption—­”

“Hold on!” exclaimed Colonel Flitcroft.  “That’s a slander upon our hearths and our government.  Why, when I was in the Council—­”

“It wasn’t a bit worse then,” Mr. Arp returned, unreasonably.  “Jest you look how the devil fools us.  He drops down this here virgin mantle on Canaan and makes it look as good as you pretend you think it is:  as good as the Sunday-school room of a country church—­though that”—­he went off on a tangent, venomously—­“is generally only another whited sepulchre, and the superintendent’s mighty apt to have a bottle of whiskey hid behind the organ, and—­”

“Look here, Eskew,” said Jonas Tabor, “that’s got nothin’ to do with—­”

“Why ain’t it?  Answer me!” cried Mr. Arp, continuing, without pause:  “Why ain’t it?  Can’t you wait till I git through?  You listen to me, and when I’m ready I’ll listen to—­”

“See here,” began the Colonel, making himself heard over three others, “I want to ask you—­”

“No, sir!” Mr. Arp pounded the floor irascibly with his hickory stick.  “Don’t you ask me anything!  How can you tell that I’m not going to answer your question without your asking it, till I’ve got through?  You listen first.  I say, here’s a town of nearly thirty thousand inhabitants, every last one of ’em—­men, women, and children—­ selfish and cowardly and sinful, if you could see their innermost natures; a town of the ugliest and worst built houses in the world, and governed by a lot of saloon-keepers—­though I hope it ’ll never git down to where the ministers can run it.  And the devil comes along, and in one night—­why, all you got to do is look at it!  You’d think we needn’t ever trouble to make it better.  That’s what the devil wants us to do—­wants us to rest easy about it, and paints it up to look like a heaven of peace and purity and sanctified spirits.  Snowfall like this would of made Lot turn the angel out-of-doors and say that the old home was good enough for him.  Gomorrah would of looked like a Puritan village—­though I’ll bet my last dollar that there was a lot, and a whole lot, that’s never been told about Puritan villages.  A lot that—­”