In the Heart of a Fool Part 3

How light a line divides comedy from tragedy! When the a.s.s speaks, or the man brays, there is comedy. Yet fate may stop the mouth of either man or a.s.s, and in the dumb struggle for voice, if fate turns the screws of destiny upon duty, there is tragedy. Only the consequences of a day or a deed can decide whether it shall have the warm blessing of our smiles or the bitter benediction of our tears.

This, one must remember in reading the chapter of this story that shall follow. It is the close of the story to which Mary Adams, with her memory book and notes and clippings, has contributed much. For of the pile of envelopes all numbered in their order; the one marked "Margaret Muller" was the last envelope that she left. Now the package that concerns Margaret Muller may not be transcribed separately but must be woven into the woof of the tale. The package contains a clipping, a dozen closely written pages, and a photograph--a small photograph of a girl. The photograph is printed on the picture of a scroll, and the likeness of the girl does not throb with life as it did thirty years ago when it was taken. Then the plump, voluptuous arm and shoulders in the front of the picture seemed to exude life and to bristle with the temptation that lurked under the brown lashes shading her big, innocent, brown eyes. And her hair, her wonderful brown hair that fell in a great rope to her knees, in this photograph is hidden, and only her frizzes, covering a fine forehead, are emphasized by the picture maker. One may smile at the picture now, but then when it was taken it told of the red of her lips and the pink of her flesh, and the dimples that forever went flickering across her face. In those days, the old-fas.h.i.+oned picture portrayed with great clearness the joy and charm and impudence of that beautiful face. But now the picture is only grotesque. It proves rather than discloses that once, when she was but a young girl, Margaret Muller had wonderfully molded arms and shoulders, regular features and enchanting eyes. But that is all the picture shows. In the photograph is no hint of her mellow voice, of her eager expression and of the smoldering fires of pa.s.sion, ambition and purpose that smoked through those gay, bewitching eyes. The old-fas.h.i.+oned frizzled hair on her forehead, the obvious pose of her hand with its cheap rings, the curious cut of her dress, made after that travesty of the prevailing mode which country papers printed in their fas.h.i.+on columns, the black court-plaster beauty spot on her cheek and the lace fichu draped over her head and bare shoulders, all stand out like grinning gargoyles that keep much of the charm she had in those days imprisoned from our eyes to-day. So the picture alone is of no great service. Nor will the clipping tell much.

It only records:

"Miss Margaret Muller, daughter of the late Herman Muller of Spring Towns.h.i.+p, this county, will teach school in District 18, the Adams District in Prospect Towns.h.i.+p, this fall and winter.

She will board with the family of ye editor."

Now the reader must know that Margaret Muller's eyes had been turned to Harvey as to a magnet for three years. She had chosen the Adams district school in Prospect Towns.h.i.+p, because the Adams district school was nearer than any other school district to Harvey; she had gone to the Adamses to board because the little bleak house near the Wahoo was the nearest house in the district to Harvey and to a social circle which she desired to enter--the best that Harvey offered.

She saw Grant, a rough, ruddy, hardy lad, of her own time of life, moving in the very center of the society she cherished in her dreams, and Margaret had no gay inadvertence in her scheme of creation. So when the lank, strapping, red-headed boy of a man's height, with a man's shoulders and a child's heart, started to Harvey for high school every morning, as she started to teach her country school, he carried with him, beside his lunch, a definite impression that Margaret was a fine girl. Often, indeed, he thought her an extraordinarily fine girl. Tales of prowess he brought back from the Harvey High School, and she listened with admiring face. For they related to youths whose names she knew as children of the socially elect.

A part of her admiration for Grant was due to the fact that Grant had leaped the social gulf--deep even then in Harvey--between those who lived on the hill, and the dwellers in the bottoms near the river.

This instinctively Margaret Muller knew, also--though perhaps unconsciously--that even if they lived in the bottoms, the Adamses were of the aristoi; because they were friends of the Nesbits, and Mrs.

Nesbit of Maryland was the fountain head of all the social glory of Harvey. Thus Margaret Muller of Spring Towns.h.i.+p came to camp before Harvey for a lifetime siege, and took her ground where she could aim straight at the Nesbits and Kollanders and Sandses and Mortons and Calvins. With all her banners flying, banners gaudy and beautiful, banners that flapped for men and sometimes snapped at women, she set her forces down before Harvey, and saw the beleaguered city through the portals of Grant's fine, wide, blue eyes, within an easy day's walk of her own place in the world. So she hovered over Grant, played her brown eyes upon him, flattered him, unconsciously as is the way of the female, when it would win favor, and because she was wise, wiser than even her own head knew, she cast upon the youth a strange spell.

Those were the days when Margaret Muller came first to early bloom. They were the days when her personality was too big for her body, so it flowed into everything she wore; on the tips of every ribbon at her neck, she glowed with a kind of electric radiance. A flower in her hair seemed as much a part of her as the turn of her cleft chin. A bow at her bosom was vibrant with her. And to Grant even the things she touched, after she was gone, thrilled him as though they were of her.

Now the pages that are to follow in this chapter are not written for him who has reached that grand estate where he may feel disdain for the feverish follies of youth. A lad may be an a.s.s; doubtless he is. A maid may be as fitful as the west wind, and in the story of the fitfulness and folly of the man and the maid, there is vast pathos and pain, from which pathos and pain we may learn wisdom. Now the strange part of this story is not what befell the youth and the maid; for any tragedy that befalls a youth and a maid, is natural enough and in the order of things, as Heaven knows well. The strange part of this story is that Mary and Amos Adams were, for all their high hopes of the sunrise, like the rest of us in this world--only human; stricken with that inexplicable parental blindness that covers our eyes when those we love are most needing our care.

Yet how could they know that Grant needed their care? Was he not in their eyes the fairest of ten thousand? They enshrined him in a kind of holy vision. It seems odd that a strapping, pimple-faced, freckled, red-headed boy, loudmouthed and husky-voiced, more or less turbulent and generally in trouble for his insistent defense of his weaker playmates--it seems odd that such a boy could be the center of such grand dreams as they dreamed for their boy. Yet there was the boy and there were the dreams. If he wrote a composition for school that pleased his parents, they were sure it foretold the future author, and among her bundle of notes for the Book, his mother has cherished the ma.n.u.script for his complete works. If at school Friday afternoon, he spoke a piece, "trippingly on the tongue," they harkened back over his ancestry to find the elder Adams of Ma.s.sachusetts who was a great orator. When he drove a nail and made a creditable bobsled, they saw in him a future architect and stored the incident for the Romance that was to be biography. When he organized a baseball club, they saw in him the budding leaders.h.i.+p that should make him a ruler of men. Even Grant's odd mania to take up the cause of the weak--often foolish causes that revealed a kind of fanatic chivalry in him--Mary noted too; and saw the youth a mailed knight in the Great Battle that should precede and usher in the sunrise.

Jasper was a little boy and his parents loved him dearly; but Grant, the child of their honeymooning days, held their hearts. And so their vanity for him became a kind of mellow madness that separated them from a commonsense world. And here is a curious thing also--the very facts that were making Grant a leader of his fellows should have warned Mary and Amos that their son was setting out on his journey from the heart of his childish paradise. He was growing tall, strong, big-voiced, with hands, broad and muscular, that made him a baseball catcher of a reputation wider than the school-grounds, yet he had a child's quick wit and merry heart. Such a boy dominated the school as a matter of course, yet so completely had his parents daubed their eyes with pride that they could not see that his leaders.h.i.+p in school came from the fact that a man was rising in him--the far-casting shadow of a virility deep and significant as destiny itself. They could not see the man's body; they saw only the child's heart. It was natural that they should ask themselves what honor could possibly come to the house of Adams or to any house, for that matter, further than that which illumined it when Grant came home to announce that he had been elected President of the senior cla.s.s in the Harvey High School and would deliver the valedictory address at commencement. When Mary and Amos learned that news, they had indeed found the hero for their book. After that, even his cousin, Morty Sands, home from college for a time, little, wiry, agile, and with a face half ferret and half angel, even Morty, who had an indefinite attachment for glowing exuberant Laura Nesbit, felt that so long as Grant held her attention--great, hulking, noisy, dominant Grant--even Morty arrayed in his college clothes, like Solomon, would have to wait until the fancy for Grant had pa.s.sed. So Morty backed Grant with all his pocket money as a ball player while he fluttered rather gayly about Ave Calvin--and always with an effect of inadvertence.

Now if a lad is an a.s.s--and he is--how should a poor jack be supposed to know of the wisdom of the serpent? For we must remember that early youth has been newly driven from the heart of that paradise wherein there is no good and evil. He gropes in darkness as he comes nearer the gates of his paradise, through an unchartered wilderness. But to Mary and Amos, Grant seemed to be wandering in the very midst of his Eden. They did not realize how he was groping and stumbling, nor could they know what a load he carried--this a.s.s of a lad coming toward the gate of the Garden.

In those times when he sat in his room, trying to show his soul bashfully to Laura Nesbit as he wrote to her in Maryland at school, Grant felt always, over and about him, the consciousness of the spell of Margaret Muller, yet he did not know what the spell was. He wrestled with it when finally he came rather dimly to sense it, and tried with all the strength of his ungainly soul to be loyal to the choice of his heart. His will was loyal, yet the smiles, the eyes, the soft tempting face of Margaret always were near him. Furious storms of feeling swayed him. For youth is the time of tempest. In our teens come those floods of soul stuff through the gates of heredity, swinging open for the last time in life, floods that bring into the world the stores of the qualities of mind and heart from outside ourselves; floods stored in Heaven's reservoir, gus.h.i.+ng from the almost limitlessly deep springs of our ancestry; floods which draw us in resistless currents to our destinies. And so the a.s.s, laden with this relay of life from the source of life, that every young, blind a.s.s brings into the world, floundered in the flood.

Grant thought his experience was unique. Yet it is the common lot of man. To feel his soul exposed at a thousand new areas of sense; to see a new heaven and a new earth--strange, mysterious, beautiful, unfolding to his eyes; to smell new scents; to hear new sounds in the woods and fields; to look open-eyed and wondering at new relations of things that unfold in the humdrum world about him, as he flees out of the blind paradise of childhood; to dream new dreams; to aspire to new heights, to feel impulses coming out of the dark that tremble like the blare of trumpets in the soul,--this is the way of youth.

With all his loyalty for Laura Nesbit--loyalty that enshrined her as a comrade and friend, such is the contradiction of youth that he was madly jealous of every big boy at the country school who cast eyes at Margaret Muller. And because she was ages older than he, she knew it; and it pleased her. She knew that she could make all his combs and crests and bands and wattles and spurs glisten, and he knew in some deep instinct that when she sang the emotion in her voice was a call to him that he could not put into words. Thus through the autumn, Margaret and Grant were thrown together daily in the drab little house by the river. Now a boy and a girl thrown together commonly make the speaking donkeys of comedy. Yet one never may be sure that they may not be the dumb struggling creatures of the tragic muse. Heaven knows Margaret Muller was funny enough in her capers. For she related her antics--her grand pouts, her elaborate condescensions, her cra.s.s coquetry and her hidings and seekings--into what she called a "case." In the only wisdom she knew, to open a flirtation was to have a "case." So Margaret ogled and laughed and touched and ran and giggled and cried and played with her prey with a practiced lore of the heart that was far beyond the boy's knowledge. Grant did not know what spell was upon him. He did not know that his great lithe body, his gripping hands, his firm legs and his long arms that had in their sinews the power that challenged her to wrestle when she was with him--he did not know what he meant to the girl who was forever teasing and bantering him when they were alone. For it was only when Margaret and Grant were alone or when no one but little Jasper was with them, that Margaret indulged in the joys of the chase.

Yet often when other boys came to see her--the country boys from the Prospect school district perhaps, or lorn swains trailing up from Spring Towns.h.i.+p--Margaret did not conceal her fluttering delight in them from Mary Adams. So the elder woman and the girl had long talks in which Margaret agreed so entirely with Mary Adams that Mary doubted the evidence of her eyes. And Amos in those days was much interested in certain transcendental communications coming from his Planchette board and purporting to be from Emerson who had recently pa.s.sed over. So Amos had no eyes for Margaret and Mary was fooled by the girl's fine speech.

Yet sometimes late at night when Margaret was coming in from a walk or a ride with one of her young men, Mary heard a laugh--a high, hysterical laugh--that disquieted Mary Adams in spite of all Margaret's fair speaking. But never once did Mary connect in her mind Margaret's wiles with Grant. Such is the blindness of mothers; such is the deep wisdom of women!

All the while Grant floundered more hopelessly into the quicksand of Margaret's enchantment, and when he tried to write to Laura Nesbit, half-formed shames fluttered and flushed across his mind. So often he sat alone for long night hours in his attic bedroom in vague agonies and self accusations, pen in hand, trying to find honest words that would fill out his tedious letter. Being a boy and being not entirely outside the gate of his childish paradise, he did not understand the shadow that was clouding his heart.

But there came one day when the gate closed and looking back, he saw the angel--the angel with the flaming sword. Then he knew. Then he saw the face that made the shadow and that day a great trembling came into his soul, a blackness of unspeakable woe came over him, and he was ashamed of the light. After that he never wrote to Laura Nesbit.

In May Margaret's school closed, and the Adamses asked her to remain with them for the summer, and she consented rather listlessly. The busy days of the June harvest combined with the duties of printing a newspaper made their Sunday visits with the Nesbits irregular. It was in July that Mrs. Nesbit asked for Margaret, and Mary Adams remembered that Margaret, whose listlessness had grown into sullenness, had found some excuse for being absent whenever the Nesbits came to spend the afternoon with the Adamses. Then in August, when Amos came home one night, he saw Margaret hurry from the front porch. He went into the house and heard Mary and Grant sobbing inside and heard Mary's voice lifted in prayer, with agony in her voice. It was no prayer for forgiveness nor for mercy, but for guidance and strength, and he stepped to the bedroom and saw the two kneeling there with Margaret's shawl over the chair where Mary knelt. There he heard Mary tell the story of her boy's shame to her G.o.d.

Death and partings have come across that threshold during these three decades. Amos Adams has known anguish and has sat with grief many times, but nothing ever has cut him to the heart like the dead, hopeless woe in Mary's voice as she prayed there in the bedroom with Grant that August night. A terrible half-hour came when Mary and Amos talked with Margaret. For over their shame at what their son had done, above their love for him, even beyond their high hope for him, rose their sense of duty to the child who was coming. For the child they spent the pa.s.sion of their shame and love and hope as they pleaded with Margaret for a child's right to a name. But she had hardened her heart. She shook her head and would not listen to their pleadings. Then they sent Grant to her. It is not easy to say which was more dreadful, the impudent smile which she turned to the parents as she shook her head at them, or the scornful laugh they heard when Grant sat with her. That was a long and weary night they spent and the sun rose in the morning under a cloud that never was lifted from their hearts.

In the six or seven sordid, awful weeks that followed before Kenyon was born, they turned for comfort and for help to Dr. Nesbit. They made his plan to save the child's good name, their plan. Of course--the Adamses were selfish. They felt a blight was on their boy's life. They could not understand that in Heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage; that when G.o.d sends a soul through the gates of earth it comes in joy even though we greet it in sorrow. Their gloom should have been lighted; part of its blackness was their own vain pride in Grant. Yet they were none the less tender with Margaret, and when she went down into the valley of the shadow, Mary went with her and stood and supported the girl in the journey.

When Doctor Nesbit was climbing into the buggy at the gate, Grant, standing by the hitching-post, said: "Doctor--sometime--when we are both older--I mean Laura--" He got no further. The Doctor looked at the boy's ashen face, and knew the cost of the words he was speaking. He stopped, reached his hand out to Grant and touched his shoulder. "I think I know, Grant--some day I shall tell her." He got into the buggy, looked at the lad a moment and said in his high, squeaky voice: "Well, Grant, boy, you understand after all it's your burden--don't you? Your mother has saved Margaret's good name. But son--son, don't you let the folks bear that burden." He paused a moment further and sighed: "Well, good-by, kid--G.o.d help you, and make a man of you," and so turning his cramping buggy, he drove away in the dusk.

Thus came Kenyon Adams, recorded in the family Bible as the third son of Mary and Amos Adams, into the wilderness of this world.

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH MARGARET MuLLER DWELLS IN MARBLE HALLS AND HENRY FENN AND KENYON ADAMS WIN NOTABLE VICTORIES

The world into which Kenyon Adams came was a busy and noisy and ruthless world. The prairie gra.s.s was leaving Harvey when Grant Adams came, and the meadow lark left in the year that Jasper came. When Kenyon entered, even the blue sky that bent over it was threatened. For Dr. Nesbit returning from the Adamses the evening that Kenyon came to Harvey found around the well-drill at Jamey McPherson's a great excited crowd. Men were elbowing each other and craning their necks, and wagging their heads as they looked at the core of the drill. For it contained unmistakably a long worm of coal. And that night saw rising over Harvey such dreams as made the angels sick; for the dreams were all of money, and its vain display and power. And when men rose after dreaming those dreams, they swept little Jamey McPherson away in short order. For he had not the high talents of the money maker. He had only persistence, industry and a hopeful spirit and a vague vision that he was discovering coal for the common good. So when Daniel Sands put his mind to bear upon the worm of coal that came wriggling up from the drilled hole on Jamey's lot, the worm crawled away from Jamey and Jamey went to work in the shaft that Daniel sank on his vacant lot near the McPherson home. The coal smoke from Daniel Sands's mines began to splotch the blue sky above the town, and Kenyon Adams missed the large leisure and joyous comraderie that Grant had seen; indeed the only leisurely person whom Kenyon saw in his life until he was--Heaven knows how old--was Rhoda Kollander. The hum and bustle of Harvey did not ruffle the calm waters of her soul. She of all the women in Harvey held to the early custom of the town of going out to spend the day.

"So that Margaret's gone," she was saying to Mary Adams sometime during a morning in the spring after Kenyon was born. "Law me--I wouldn't have a boarder. I tell John, the sanct.i.ty of the home is invaded by boarders these days; and her going out to the dances in town the way she does, I sh'd think you'd be glad to be alone again, and to have your own little flock to do for. And so Grant's going to be a carpenter--well, well! He didn't take to the printing trade, did he? My, my!" she sighed, and folded her hands above her ap.r.o.n--the ap.r.o.n which she always put on after a meal, as if to help with the dishes, but which she never soiled or wrinkled--"I tell John I'm so thankful our little Fred has such a nice place. He waits table there at the Palace, and gets all his meals--such nice food, and can go to school too, and you wouldn't believe it if I'd tell you all the nice men he meets--drummers and everything, and he's getting such good manners. I tell John there's nothing like the kind of folks a boy is with in his teens to make him.

And he sees Tom Van Dorn every day nearly and sometimes gets a dime for serving him, and now, honest, Mary, you wouldn't believe it, but Freddie says the help around the hotel say that Mauling girl at the cigar stand thinks Tom's going to marry her, but law me--he's aiming higher than the Maulings. The old man is going to die--did you know it? They came for John to sit up with him last night. John's an Odd Fellow, you know. But speaking of that Margaret, you know she's a friend of Violet's and slips into the cigar stand sometimes and Violet introduces Margaret to some nice drummers. And I heard John say that when Margaret gets this term of school taught here, the Spring Towns.h.i.+p people have made Doc Jim get her a job in the court house--register of deeds office. But I tell John--law me, you men are the worst gossips! Talk about women!"

Little Kenyon in his crib was restless, and Mary Adams was clattering the dishes, so between the two evils, Mrs. Kollander picked up the child, and rocked him and patted him and then went on: "I was over and spent the day with the Sandses the other day. Poor woman, she's real puny. Ann's such a pretty child and Mrs. Sands says that Morty's not goin' back to college again. And she says he just moons around Laura Nesbit. Seems like the boy's got no sense. Why, Laura's just a child--she's Grant's age, isn't she--not more than eighteen or nineteen, and Morty must be nearly twenty-three. My--how they have sprung up. I tell John--why, I'll be thirty-six right soon now, and here I've worked and slaved my youth away and I'll be an old woman before we know it."

She laughed good naturedly and rocked the fretting child. "Law me, Mary Adams, I sh'd think you'd want Grant to stay with George Brotherton there in the cigar stand, instead of carpentering. Such elegant people he can meet there, and such refined influences since Mr. Brotherton's put in books and newspapers, and he could work in the printing office and deliver the Kansas City and St. Louis and Chicago dailies for Mr.

Brotherton, and do so much better than he can carpentering. I tell John, if we can just keep our boy among nice people until he's twenty-five, he'll stay with 'em. Now look at Lide Bowman. Mary Adams, we know she was a smart woman until she married d.i.c.k and now just see her--living down there with the shanty trash and all those ignorant foreigners, and she's growing like 'em. She's lost two of her babies, and that seems to be weighing on her mind, and I can't persuade her to pick up and move out of there. It's like being in another world. And Mary Adams--let me tell you--Casper Herd.i.c.ker has gone into the mine. Yes, sir, he closed his shop and is going to work in the mine, because he can make three dollars a day. But law me! you'll not see Hildy Herd.i.c.ker moving down there. She'll keep her millinery store and live with the white folks."

The dishes were put away, and in the long afternoon Mary Adams sat sewing as Rhoda Kollander rambled on. For the third time Rhoda came back to comment upon the fact that Grant Adams had quit working in the printing office--a genteel trade, and had stopped delivering papers for Mr. Brotherton's newspaper stand--a rather high vocation, and was degrading himself by learning the carpenter's trade, when Mary Adams cut into the current of the stream of talk.

"Well, my dear, it was this way. There are two reasons why Grant is learning the carpenter's trade. In the first place, the boy has some sort of a pa.s.sion to cast his lot among the poor. He feels they are neglected and--well, he has a sort of a fierce streak in him to fight for the under dog, and--"

"Well, law me, Mary--don't I know that? Hasn't Freddie told me time and again how Grant used to fight for Freddie when he was a little boy and the big boys plagued him. Grant whipped the whole school for teasing a little half-witted boy once--did you know that?" Mary Adams shook her head. "Well, he did, and--well now, isn't that nice. I can see just how he feels!" And she could. Never lived a more sympathetic soul than Rhoda. And as she rocked she said: "Of course, if that's the reason--law me, Mary, you never can tell how these children are going to turn out.

Why, I tell John--"

"And the other reason is, Rhoda, that he is earning two dollars a day as a carpenter's helper, and since Kenyon came we seem to be miserably hard pushed for money." Mary Adams stopped and then went on as one carefully choosing her words: "And since Margaret has gone to board over at the other side of the school district, and we don't have her board money--why of course--"

"Why of course," echoed Mrs. Kollander, "of course. I tell John he's been in a county office now twenty years, drawing all the way from a thousand to three thousand a year--and what have we got to show for it?

I scrimp and pinch and save, and John does too--but law me--it seems like the way times are--" Amos Adams, standing at the door, heard her and cut in:

"I was talking the other night with George Was.h.i.+ngton about the times, and they're coming around all right." The man fumbled his sandy beard, closed his eyes as if to remember something and went on: "Let's see, he wrote: 'Peas and potatoes preserve the people,' and the next day, everything in the market dropped but peas and potatoes." He nodded a wise head. "They think that planchette is nonsense, but how do they account for coincidences like that! And now tell me some news for the _Tribune_." The two sat talking well into the twilight and when Rhoda pulled up her chair to the supper table, the editor's notebook was full.

Grant appeared, an ox-shouldered, red-haired, ba.s.s-voiced boy with ham-like hands; Jasper came in from school full of the town's adventure into coal and the industries, and his chatter trickled into the powerful but slowly spoken insistence of Mrs. Kollander's talk and was lost and swept finally into silence. After supper Grant retired to a book from the Sea-side Library, borrowed of Mr. Brotherton from stock--"Sesame and Lilies" was its t.i.tle. Jasper plunged into his bookkeeping studies and by the wood stove in the sitting-room Rhoda Kollander held her levee until bedtime sent her home.

During the noon hour the next day in Mr. Brotherton's cigar store and news stand, the walnut bench was filled that he had just installed for the comfort of his customers. At one end, was Grant Adams who had hurried up from the mines to buy a paperbound copy of Carlyle's "French Revolution"; next to him sat deaf John Kollander smoking his noon cigar, and beside Kollander sat stuttering Kyle Perry, thriftily sponging his morning Kansas City _Times_ over Dr. Nesbit's shoulder. The absent brother always was on the griddle at Mr. Brotherton's amen corner, and the burnt offering of the moment was Henry Fenn. He had just broken over a protracted drouth--one of a year and a half--and the group was shaking sad heads over the county attorney's downfall. The doctor was saying, "It's a disease, just as the 'ladies, G.o.d bless 'em' will become a disease with Tom Van Dorn if he doesn't stop pretty soon--a nervous disease and sooner or later they will both go down. Poor Henry--Bedelia and I noticed him at the charity ball last night; he was--"

"A trifle polite--a wee bit too punctilious for these lat.i.tudes,"

laughed Brotherton from behind the counter.

"I was going to say decorative--what Mrs. Nesbit calls ornate--kind of rococco in manner," squeaked the doctor, and sighed. "And yet I can see he's still fighting his devil--still trying to keep from going clear under."

"It's a sh-sh-sh-a-ame that ma-a-an should have th-that kind of a d-d-d-devil in him--is-isis-n't it?" said Kyle Perry, and John Kollander, who had been smoking in peace, blurted out, "What else can be expected under a Democratic administration? Of course, they'll return the rebel flags. They'll pension the rebel soldiers next!" He looked around for approval, and the smiles of the group would have lured him further but Tom Van Dorn came swinging through the door with his princely manner, and the Doctor rose to go. He motioned George Brotherton to the rear of the room and said gently:

"George--old man Mauling died an hour ago; John Dexter and I were there at the last. And John sent word for me to have you get your choir out--so I'll notify Mrs. Nesbit. Dexter said he was a lodge member with you--what lodge, George?"

"Odd Fellow," returned the big man, then asked, "Pall-bearer?"

"Yes," returned the Doctor. "There's no one else much but the lodge in his case. You will sing him to sleep with your choir and tuck him in as pall-bearer as you've been doing for the dead folks ever since you came to town." The Doctor turned to go, "Meet to-night at the house for choir practice, I suppose?"

Brotherton nodded, and turned to take a bill from Tom Van Dorn, who had pocketed a handful of cigars and a number of papers.