This is Marny’s story, not mine. He had a hammer in his hand at the time and a tack between his teeth.

“Going to hang Fiddles right under the old fellow’s head,” he burst out. “That’s where he belongs. I’d have given a ten-acre if he could have drawn a bead on that elk himself. Fiddles behind a .44 Winchester and that old buck browsing to windward”—and he nodded at the elk’s head—“would have made the village Mayor sit up and think. What a picturesque liar you are, Fiddles”—here the point of the tack was pressed into the plaster with Marny’s fat thumb—“and what a good-for-nothing, breezy, lovable vagabond”—(Bang! Bang! Hammer at play now)—“you could be when you tried. There!”

Marny stepped back and took in the stuffed head and wide-branched antlers of the magnificent elk (five feet six from skull to tips) and the small, partly faded miniature of a young man in a student cap and high-collared coat.

I waited and let him run on. It is never wise to interrupt Marny. He will lose the thread of his talk if you do, and though he starts off immediately on another lead, and one, perhaps equally graphic, he has left you suspended in mid-air so far as the tale you were getting interested in is concerned. Who Fiddles was and why his Honor the Mayor should sit up and think; why, too, the miniature of the young man—and he was young and remarkably good-looking, as I well knew, having seen the picture many times before on his mantel—should now be suspended below the elk’s head, would come out in time if I loosened my ear-flaps and buttoned up my tongue, but not if I reversed the operation.