“It gits more interestin’,” Talmadge resumed. “That eagle started into tellin’ me what weather was comin’. Fair or foul, I’d know. Come the day when me and the eagle is lookin’ each other in the eye, and this real bad feelin’ come over me. There was gone to be a right bad blow, with loss of life. Warned one and all, but they didn’t lissen, thinkin’ me to be addled. That gale blew three whole days and three whole nights. Two boats and four men was lost. There ain’t but sixty-odd men in this whole town, and to lose four wasn’t no small thing, but folks lissened to me from then on. I become a weather prophet.

“But here’s where the devil come in, boys. Figgered to get rich off my gift and started to charge folks for what the eagle had to say. Meantime, the eagle’s startin’ into tellin’ me other things, like if a woman was with child, if it was to be boy or girl and what day it was to be borned. Charged for that, too. Soon enough, I become famous all up and down this coast, folks comin’ from near and far, wantin’ to know one thing or t’other. Well, there was times the eagle didn’t have nothin’ to say, so I’d make somethin’ up. Some of them prophecies didn’t come true, but a lot did—reckon it was luck—and the dimes and nickels and the quarters started to pile on up. Now I was a fortune-teller. The Reverend Dewey Jenkins heard tell what was goin’ on, and was he hoppin’ mad! Made me the subject of his sermon one Sunday. Points right at me in front of the en-tire congregation and says the Bible has got some things to say about sorcerers and what he called divinators, and wasn’t none of them good. He read some scripture, don’t recollect what now.…”

“Deuteronomy or Jeremiah,” Drew interrupted. Listening to this nonsense insulted his intelligence. It was worse by far than all that baloney about Aunt Sophronia. “There’s Jeremiah twenty-nine, verses eight and nine. ‘Let not your prophets and your diviners, that be in the midst of you, deceive you.… For they prophesy falsely unto you in my name: I have not sent them.’ ”

Talmadge pushed his chair back and slapped the table.

“I’ll be … Them’s the words exactly.”

“He reads a lot and he’s got a photographic memory,” said Eliot.