Mr. Butefish sat down and dried the inside of his collar with his handkerchief midst tumultuous applause.
The evening had been a veritable love-feast without a jarring note and everybody glowed with a feeling of neighborliness and confidence in a future that was to bring them affluence.
"Mr. Chairman, may I have a word?"
There was a general turning of heads as Mormon Joe, thick of tongue, lurched over the back of the seat in front.
"Kindly make it brief," replied Mr. Butefish reluctantly. "We still have important business to transact."
"I only want to say that this country hasn't any more natural resources than a tin roof and when Prouty got any bigger than a saloon and a blacksmith shop it overreached itself." There was a tightening of lips as the members exchanged looks, but Mormon Joe went on, "One third of the work that you dry farmers put in trying to make ranches out of arid land," he addressed a row of tousled gentlemen on the front seat, "would bring you independence in a state where climatic conditions are favorable to raising crops.
"As for your ditch, there never was an irrigation project yet that did not cost double and treble the original estimate. If you try to put it through without outside help, you'll all go broke. In other words," he jeered, "you haven't one damned asset but your climate, and you're wasting your time and energy until you figure out a way to realize on that."
Shabby, undersized, distinctly drunk, Mormon Joe made an unheroic figure as he stood swaying on his feet looking mockingly into the frowning faces of the Boosters Club, and yet, somehow, his words cast a momentary depression over the room.
He stood an instant, then staggered out, indifferent to the fact that he had committed the supreme offense in a western town--he had "knocked"--and that henceforth and forever he was a marked man--a detriment to the community--to be discredited, shunned, and, if possible, driven out.
The invitation composed and printed by Mr. Butefish after much mental travail, requesting the pleasure of the Toomeys' company at a reception and dance in the Prouty House to celebrate the third year of the town's prosperity and progress was one of the results of this meeting of the Boosters Club.
Toomey's thin lips curled superciliously as he glanced at it and tossed it across the breakfast table: "Here, Hughie, why don't you take this in?"
"You'll go, won't you?" the lad asked eagerly after reading it.
"We never mingle socially with the natives." As Mrs. Toomey shook her head her smile and tone expressed ineffable exclusiveness. Seeing that the boy's face fell in disappointment she urged, "But you go, Hughie."