r ears
and moan: "Poor old Peggy! O-oh! My gracious! He'll--he'll kill her!"

Occasionally he threw a stove-lid or a hatchet or something else at his
wife, but his aim was singularly bad, for try as he would, he did not
appear to come closer than five or six feet to her with any of the
missiles. Once in a while he displayed the most appalling desire to
destroy everything in sight. On such occasions he smashed chairs, broke
up the crockery or tramped all over the garments that Mrs. Fry had just
hung out to dry. By mistake, he once picked up a hot stove-lid, and then
he swore in earnest. His dutiful wife wrapped his hand up in soda and
called the stove-lid a "nasty old thing!"

In a very short time everybody in Tinkletown was talking about Lucius
Fry. Some one, lying with a little more enterprise than the rest,
started the report that he had gone to Boggs City, the county seat, and
had thrashed a bartender who refused to sell him a drink. This report
grew until Lucius was credited with having polished off a whole bar-room
full of men without so much as sustaining a scratch himself.

When Lucius appeared on Main Street, men who had never noticed him
before went out of their way to be polite and friendly. Women who pitied
Mrs. Fry looked at him with interest and called him, under their breath,
a "big ugly brute." Children stopped playing and ran when they saw
Lucius Fry approaching.

Harry Squires, editor of _The Banner_, in reporting one of Mr. Fry's
most violent eruptions, alluded to him as "vicious Lucius." The name
clung to the little man. It was some time before the general public
could utter it with confidence. Haste was not conducive to accuracy.
Rash assuredness frequently turned Mr. Fry into "Vooshious Lishius" or
"Lishius Vooshious" or even "V'looshious Ooshious."

Mrs. Fry, in course of time, grew to be very proud of her master, the
despot of Power-house Gully. She revealed her pride every time she fell
in with acquaintances on the way to church. In reply to an oft-repeated
question as to why Mr. Fry did not go to church with her any longer, she
invariably gave the supercilious reply that nowadays when she requested
her husband to go to church, he told her to go to hell instead--and that
was the kind of a man she respected, she said, not one of your
weak-kneed, henpecked cowards who go to church because they are more
afraid of their wives than they are of the devil. And while the
mountainous Mrs. Fry was no