The Gentleman From Indiana

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At half-past seven, the Hon. Kedge Halloway of Amo delivered himself of
his lecture; "The Past and Present. What we may Glean from Them, and Their
Influence on the Future." At seven the court-room was crowded, and Miss
Tibbs, seated on the platform (reserved for prominent citizens), viewed
the expectant throng with rapture. It is possible that she would have
confessed to witnessing a sea of faces, but it is more probable that she
viewed the expectant throng. The thermometer stood at eighty-seven degrees
and there was a rustle of incessantly moving palm-leaf fans as, row by
row, their yellow sides twinkled in the light of eight oil lamps. The
stouter ladies wielded their fans with vigor. There were some very pretty
faces in Mr. Halloway's audience, but it is a peculiarity of Plattville
that most of those females who do not incline to stoutness incline far in
the opposite direction, and the lean ladies naturally suffered less from
the temperature than their sisters. The shorn lamb is cared for, but often
there seems the intention to impart a moral in the refusal of Providence
to temper warm weather to the full-bodied.

Old Tom Martin expressed a strong consciousness of such intention when he
observed to the shocked Miss Selina, as Mr. Bill Snoddy, the stoutest
citizen of the county, waddled abnormally up the aisle: "The Almighty must
be gittin" a heap of fun out of Bill Snoddy to-night."

"Oh, Mr. Martin!" exclaimed Miss Tibbs, fluttering at his irreverence.

"Why, you would yourself. Miss Seliny," returned old Tom. Mr. Martin
always spoke in one key, never altering the pitch of his high, dry,
unctuous drawl, though, when his purpose was more than ordinarily
humorous, his voice assumed a shade of melancholy. Now and then he
meditatively passed his fingers through his gray beard, which followed the
line of his jaw, leaving his upper lip and most of his chin smooth-shaven.
"Did you ever reason out why folks laugh so much at fat people?" he
continued. "No, ma'am. Neither'd anybody else."

"Why is it, Mr. Martin?" asked Miss Selina.

"It's like the Creator's sayin', 'Let there be light.' He says, 'Let
ladies be lovely--'" (Miss Tibbs bowed)--"and 'Let men-folks be honest--
sometimes;' and, 'Let fat people be held up to ridicule till they fall
off.' You can't tell why it is; it was jest ordained that-a-way."

The room was so crowded that the juvenile portion of the assemblage was
ensconced in the windows. Strange to say, the youth of Plattville were not
present under protest, as their fellows of a metropolis would have been,
lectures being well understood by the young of great cities to have
instructive tendencies. The boys came to-night because they insisted upon
coming. It was an event. Some of them had made sacrifices to come,
enduring even the agony (next to hair-cutting in suffering) of having
their ears washed. Conscious of parental eyes, they fronted the public
with boyhood's professional expressionlessness, though they communicated
with each other aside in a cipher-language of their own, and each group
was a hot-bed of furtive gossip and sarcastic comment. Seated in the
windows, they kept out what small breath of air might otherwise have
stolen in to comfort the audience.

Their elders sat patiently dripping with perspiration, most of the
gentlemen undergoing the unusual garniture of stiffly-starched collars,
those who had not cultivated chin beards to obviate such arduous
necessities of pomp and state, hardly bearing up under the added anxiety
of cravats. However, they sat outwardly meek under the yoke; nearly all of
them seeking a quiet solace of tobacco--not that they smoked; Heaven and
the gallantry of Carlow County forbid--nor were there anywhere visible
tokens of the comforting ministrations of nicotine to violate the eye of
etiquette. It is an art of Plattville.

Suddenly there was a hum and a stir and a buzz of whispering in the room.
Two gray old men and two pretty young women passed up the aisle to the
platform. One old man was stalwart and ruddy, with a cordial eye and a
handsome, smooth-shaven, big face. The other was bent and trembled
slightly; his face was very white; he had a fine high brow, deeply lined,
the brow of a scholar, and a grandly flowing white beard that covered his
chest, the beard of a patriarch. One of the young women was tall and had
the rosy cheeks and pleasant eyes of her father, who preceded her. The
other was the strange lady.

A universal perturbation followed her progress up the aisle, if she had
known it. She was small and fair, very daintily and beautifully made; a
pretty Marquise whose head Greuze. should have painted Mrs. Columbus
Landis, wife of the proprietor of the Palace Hotel, conferring with a lady
in the next seat, applied an over-burdened adjective: "It ain't so much
she's han'some, though she is, that--but don't you notice she's got a kind
of smart look to her? Her bein' so teeny, kind of makes it more so,
somehow, too." What stunned the gossips of the windows to awed admiration,
however, was the unconcerned and stoical fashion in which she wore a long
bodkin straight through her head. It seemed a large sacrifice merely to
make sure one's hat remained in place.

The party took seats a little to the left and rear of the lecturer's
table, and faced the audience. The strange lady chatted gaily with the
other three, apparently as unconscious of the multitude of eyes fixed upon
her as the gazers were innocent of rude intent. There were pretty young
women in Plattville; Minnie Briscoe was the prettiest, and, as the local
glass of fashion reflected, "the stylishest"; but this girl was different,
somehow, in a way the critics were puzzled to discover--different, from
the sparkle of her eyes and the crown of her trim sailor hat, to the edge
of her snowy duck skirt.

Judd Bennett sighed a sigh that was heard in every corner of the room. As
everybody immediately turned to look at him, he got up and went out.

It had long been a jocose fiction of Mr. Martin, who was a widower of
thirty years' standing, that he and the gifted authoress by his side were
in a state of courtship. Now he bent his rugged head toward her to
whisper: "I never thought to see the day you'd have a rival in my
affections. Miss Seliny, but yonder looks like it. I reckon I'll have to
go up to Ben Tinkle's and buy that fancy vest he's had in stock this last
twelve year or more. Will you take me back when she's left the city again;
Miss Seliny?" he drawled. "I expect, maybe, Miss Sherwood is one of these
here summer girls. I've heard of 'em but I never see one before. You
better take warning and watch me--Fisbee won't have no clear field from
now on."

The stranger leaned across to speak to Miss Briscoe and her sleeve touched
the left shoulder of the old man with the patriarchal white beard. A
moment later he put his right hand to that shoulder and gently moved it up
and down with a caressing motion over the shabby black broadcloth her
garment had touched.

"Look at that old Fisbee!" exclaimed Mr. Martin, affecting indignation.
"Never be 'n half as spruced up and wide awake in all his life. He's
prob'ly got her to listen to him on the decorations of Nineveh--it's my
belief he was there when it was destroyed. Well, if I can't cut him out
we'll get our respected young friend of the 'Herald' to do it."

"Sh!" returned Miss Tibbs. "Here he is."

The seats upon the platform were all occupied, except the two foremost
ones in the centre (one on each side of a little table with a lamp, a
pitcher of ice-water, and a glass) reserved for the lecturer and the
gentleman who was to introduce him. Steps were audible in the hall, and
every one turned to watch the door, where the distinguished pair now made
their appearance in a hush of expectation over which the beating of the
fans alone prevailed. The Hon. Kedge Halloway was one of the gleaners of
the flesh-pots, himself, and he marched into the room unostentatiously
mopping his shining expanse of brow with a figured handkerchief. He was a
person of solemn appearance; a fat gold watch-chain which curved across
his ponderous front, adding mysteriously to his gravity. At his side
strolled a very tall, thin, rather stooping--though broad-shouldered--
rather shabby young man with a sallow, melancholy face and deep-set eyes
that looked tired. When they were seated, the orator looked over his
audience slowly and with an incomparable calm; then, as is always done, he
and the melancholy young man exchanged whispers for a few moments. After
this there was a pause, at the end of which the latter rose and announced
that it was his pleasure and his privilege to introduce, that evening, a
gentleman who needed no introduction to that assemblage. What citizen of
Carlow needed an introduction, asked the speaker, to the orator they had
applauded in the campaigns of the last twenty years, the statesman author
of the Halloway Bill, the most honored citizen of the neighboring and
flourishing county and city of Amo? And, the speaker would say, that if
there were one thing the citizens of Carlow could be held to envy the
citizens of Amo, it was the Honorable Kedge Halloway, the thinker, to
whose widely-known paper they were about to have the pleasure and
improvement of listening.

The introduction was so vehemently applauded that, had there been present
a person connected with the theatrical profession, he might have been
nervous for fear the introducer had prepared no encore. "Kedge is too
smart to take it all to himself," commented Mr. Martin. "He knows it's
half account of the man that said it."

He was not mistaken. Mr. Halloway had learned a certain perceptiveness on
the stump. Resting one hand upon his unfolded notes upon the table, he
turned toward the melancholy young man (who had subsided into the small of
his back in his chair) and, after clearing his throat, observed with
sudden vehemence that he must thank his gifted friend for his flattering
remarks, but that when he said that Carlow envied Amo a Halloway, it must
be replied that Amo grudged no glory to her sister county of Carlow, but,
if Amo could find envy in her heart it would be because Carlow possessed a
paper so sterling, so upright, so brilliant, so enterprising as the
"Carlow County Herald," and a journalist so talented, so gifted, so
energetic, so fearless, as its editor.

The gentleman referred to showed very faint appreciation of these ringing
compliments. There was a lamp on the table beside him, against which, to
the view of Miss Sherwood of Rouen, his face was silhouetted, and very
rarely had it been her lot to see a man look less enthusiastic under
public and favorable comment of himself. She wondered if he, also,
remembered the Muggleton cricket match and the subsequent dinner oratory.

The lecture proceeded. The orator winged away to soary heights with
gestures so vigorous as to cause admiration for his pluck in making use of
them on such a night; the perspiration streamed down his face, his neck
grew purple, and he dared the very face of apoplexy, binding his auditors
with a double spell. It is true that long before the peroration the
windows were empty and the boys were eating stolen, unripe fruit in the
orchards of the listeners. The thieves were sure of an alibi.

The Hon. Mr. Halloway reached a logical conclusion which convinced even
the combative and unwilling that the present depends largely upon the
past, while the future will be determined, for the most part, by the
conditions of the present. "The future," he cried, leaning forward with an
expression of solemn warning, "The future is in our own hands, ladies and
gentlemen of the city of Plattville. Is it not so? We will find it so.
Turn it over in your minds." He leaned backward and folded his hands
benevolently on his stomach and said in a searching whisper; "Ponder it."
He waited for them to ponder it, and little Mr. Swanter, the druggist and
bookseller, who prided himself on his politeness and who was seated
directly in front, scratched his head and knit his brows to show that he
was pondering it. The stillness was intense; the fans ceased to beat; Mr.
Snoddy could be heard breathing dangerously. Mr. Swanter was considering
the advisability of drawing a pencil from his pocket and figuring on it
upon his cuff, when suddenly, with the energy of a whirlwind, the lecturer
threw out his arms to their fullest extent and roared: "It is a _fact_! It
is carven on stone in the gloomy caverns of TIME. It is writ in FIRE on
the imperishable walls of Fate!"

After the outburst, his voice sank with startling rapidity to a tone of
honeyed confidence, and he wagged an inviting forefinger at Mr. Snoddy,
who opened his mouth. "Shall we take an example? Not from the marvellous,
my friends; let us seek an illustration from the ordinary. Is that not
better? One familiar to the humblest of us. One we can all comprehend. One
from our every-day life. One which will interest even the young. Yes. The
common house-fly. On a window-sill we place a bit of fly-paper, and
contiguous to it, a flower upon which the happy insect likes to feed and
rest. The little fly approaches. See, he hovers between the two. One is a
fatal trap, an ambuscade, and the other a safe harbor and an innocuous
haven. But mystery allures him. He poises, undecided. That is the present.
That, my friends, is the Present! What will he do? WHAT will he do? What
will he DO? Memories of the past are whispering to him: 'Choose the
flower. Light on the posy.' Here we clearly see the influence of the past
upon the present. But, to employ a figure of speech, the fly-paper beckons
to the insect toothsomely, and, thinks he; 'Shall I give it a try? Shall
I? Shall I give it a try?' The future is in his own hands to make or
unmake. The past, the voice of Providence, has counselled him: 'Leave it
alone, leave it alone, little fly. Go away from there.' Does he heed the
warning? Does he heed it, ladies and gentlemen? Does he? Ah, no! He
springs into the air, decides between the two attractions, one of them, so
deadly to his interests and--_drops upon the fly-paper to perish
miserably_! The future is in his hands no longer. We must lie upon the bed
that we have made, nor can Providence change its unalterable decrees."

After the tragedy, the orator took a swallow of water, mopped his brow
with the figured handkerchief and announced that a new point herewith
presented itself for consideration. The audience sank back with a gasp of
release from the strain of attention. Minnie Briscoe, leaning back,
breathless like the others, became conscious that a tremor agitated her
visitor. Miss Sherwood had bent her head behind the shelter of the judge's
broad shoulders; was shaking slightly and had covered her face with her
hands.

"What is it, Helen?" whispered Miss Briscoe, anxiously. "What is it? Is
something the matter?"

"Nothing. Nothing, dear." She dropped her hands from her face. Her cheeks
were deep crimson, and she bit her lip with determination.

"Oh, but there is! Why, you've tears in your eyes. Are you faint? What is
it?"

"It is only--only----" Miss Sherwood choked, then cast a swift glance at
the profile of the melancholy young man. The perfectly dismal decorum of
this gentleman seemed to inspire her to maintain her own gravity. "It is
only that it seemed such a pity about that fly," she explained. From where
they sat the journalistic silhouette was plainly visible, and both Fisbee
and Miss Sherwood looked toward it often, the former with the wistful,
apologetic fidelity one sees in the eyes of an old setter watching his
master.

When the lecture was over many of the audience pressed forward to shake
the Hon. Mr. Halloway's hand. Tom Martin hooked his arm in that of the
sallow gentleman and passed out with him.

"Mighty humanizin' view Kedge took of that there insect," remarked Mr.
Martin. "I don't recollect I ever heard of no mournfuller error than
that'n. I noticed you spoke of Halloway as a 'thinker,' without mentioning
what kind. I didn't know, before, that you were as cautious a man as
that."

"Does your satire find nothing sacred, Martin?" returned the other, "not
even the Honorable Kedge Halloway?"

"I wouldn't presume," replied old Tom, "to make light of the catastrophe
that overtook the heedless fly. When Halloway went on to other subjects I
was so busy picturin' the last moments of that closin' life, stuck there
in the fly-paper, I couldn't listen to him. But there's no use dwellin' on
a sorrow we can't help. Look at the moon; it's full enough to cheer us
up." They had emerged from the court-house and paused on the street as the
stream of townsfolk divided and passed by them to take different routes
leading from the Square. Not far away, some people were getting into a
buckboard. Fisbee and Miss Sherwood were already on the rear seat.

"Who's with him, to-night, Mr. Fisbee?" asked Judge Briscoe in a low
voice.

"No one. He is going directly to the office. To-morrow is Thursday, one of
our days of publication."

"Oh, then it's all right. Climb in, Minnie, we're waiting for you." The
judge offered his hand to his daughter.

"In a moment, father," she answered. "I'm going to ask him to call," she
said to the other girl.

"But won't he--"

Miss Briscoe laughed. "He never comes to see me!" She walked over to where
Martin and the young man were looking up at the moon, and addressed the
journalist.

"I've been trying to get a chance to speak to you for a week," she said,
offering him her hand; "I wanted to tell you I had a friend coming to
visit me Won't you come to see us? She's here."

The young man bowed. "Thank you," he answered. "Thank you, very much. I
shall be very glad." His tone had the meaningless quality of perfunctory
courtesy; Miss Briscoe detected only the courtesy; but the strange lady
marked the lack of intention in his words.

"Don't you include me, Minnie?" inquired Mr Martin, plaintively. "I'll try
not to be too fascinatin', so as to give our young friend a show. It was
love at first sight with me. I give Miss Seliny warning soon as your folks
come in and I got a good look at the lady."

As the buckboard drove away, Miss Sherwood, who had been gazing
steadfastly at the two figures still standing in the street, the tall
ungainly old one, and the taller, loosely-held young one (he had not
turned to look at her) withdrew her eyes from them, bent them seriously
upon Fisbee, and asked: "What did you mean when you said no one was with
him to-night?"

"That no one was watching him," he answered.

"Watching him? I don't understand."

"Yes; he has been shot at from the woods at night and----"

The girl shivered. "But who watches him?"

"The young men of the town. He has a habit of taking long walks after
dark, and he is heedless of all remonstrance. He laughs at the idea of
curtailing the limit of his strolls or keeping within the town when night
has fallen; so the young men have organized a guard for him, and every
evening one of them follows him until he goes to the office to work for
the night. It is a different young man every evening, and the watcher
follows at a distance so that he does not suspect."

"But how many people know of this arrangement?"

"Nearly every one in the county except the Cross-Roads people, though it
is not improbable that they have discovered it."

"And has no one told him"

"No; it would annoy him; he would not allow it to continue. He will not
even arm himself."

"They follow and watch him night after night, and every one knows and no
one tells him? Oh, I must say," cried the girl, "I think these are good
people."

The stalwart old man on the front seat shook out the reins and whined the
whip over his roans' backs. "They are the people of your State and mine.
Miss Sherwood," he said in his hearty voice, "the best people in God's
world--and I'm not running for Congress, either!"

"But how about the Six-Cross-Roads people, father?" asked Minnie.

"We'll wipe them clean out some day," answered her father--"possibly
judicially, possibly----"

"Surely judiciously?" suggested Miss Sherwood.

"If you care to see what a bad settlement looks like, we'll drive through
there to-morrow--by daylight," said Briscoe. "Even the doctor doesn't
insist on being in that neighborhood after dark. They are trying their
best to get Harkless, and if they do----"

"If they do!" repeated Miss Sherwood. She clasped Fisbee's hand gently.
His eyes shone and he touched her fingers with a strange, shy reverence.

"You will meet him to-morrow," he said.

She laughed and pressed his hand. "I'm afraid not. He wasn't even
interested enough to look at me."

CHAPTER III

LONESOMENESS

When the rusty hands of the office clock marked half-past four, the
editor-in-chief of the "Carlow County Herald" took his hand out of his
hair, wiped his pen on his last notice from the White-Caps, put on his
coat, swept out the close little entry, and left the sanctum for the
bright June afternoon.

He chose the way to the west, strolling thoughtfully out of town by the
white, hot, deserted Main Street, and thence onward by the country road
into which its proud half-mile of old brick store buildings, tumbled-down
frame shops and thinly painted cottages degenerated. The sun was in his
face, where the road ran between the summer fields, lying waveless, low,
gracious in promise; but, coming to a wood of hickory and beech and walnut
that stood beyond, he might turn his down-bent-hat-brim up and hold his
head erect. Here the shade fell deep and cool on the green tangle of rag
and iron weed and long grass in the corners of the snake fence, although
the sun beat upon the road so dose beside. There was no movement in the
crisp young leaves overhead; high in the boughs there was a quick flirt of
crimson where two robins hopped noiselessly. No insect raised resentment
of the lonesomeness: the late afternoon, when the air is quite still, had
come; yet there rested--somewhere--on the quiet day, a faint, pleasant,
woody smell. It came to the editor of the "Herald" as he climbed to the
top rail of the fence for a seat, and he drew a long, deep breath to get
the elusive odor more luxuriously--and then it was gone altogether.

"A habit of delicacies," he said aloud, addressing the wide silence
complainingly. He drew a faded tobacco-bag and a brier pipe from his coat
pocket and filled and lit the pipe. "One taste--and they quit," he
finished, gazing solemnly upon the shining little town down the road. He
twirled the pouch mechanically about his finger, and then, suddenly
regarding it, patted it caressingly. It had been a giddy little bag, long
ago, satin, and gay with embroidery in the colors of the editor's
university; and although now it was frayed to the verge of tatters, it
still bore an air of pristine jauntiness, an air of which its owner in no
wise partook. He looked from it over the fields toward the town in the
clear distance and sighed softly as he put the pouch back in his pocket,
and, resting his arm on his knee and his chin in his hand, sat blowing
clouds of smoke out of the shade into the sunshine, absently watching the
ghostly shadows dance on the white dust of the road.

A little garter snake crept under the fence beneath him and disappeared in
the underbrush; a rabbit progressing timidly on his travels by a series of
brilliant dashes and terror-smitten halts, came within a few yards of him,
sat up with quivering nose and eyes alight with fearful imaginings--
vanished, a flash of fluffy brown and white. Shadows grew longer; the
brier pipe sputtered feebly in depletion and was refilled. A cricket
chirped and heard answer; there was a woodland stir of breezes; and the
pair of robins left the branches overhead in eager flight, vacating before
the arrival of a great flock of blackbirds hastening thither ere the
eventide should be upon them. The blackbirds came, chattered, gossiped,
quarrelled, and beat each other with their wings above the smoker sitting
on the top fence rail.

But he had remembered--it was Commencement. To-day, a thousand miles to
the east, a company of grave young gentlemen sat in semi-circular rows
before a central altar, while above them rose many tiers of mothers and
sisters and sweethearts, listening to the final word. He could see it all
very clearly: the lines of freshly shaven, boyish faces, the dainty gowns,
the flowers and bright eyes above, and the light that filtered in through
stained glass to fall softly over them all, with, here and there, a vivid
splash of color, Gothic shaped. He could see the throngs of white-clad
loungers under the elms without, under-classmen, bored by the Latin
addresses and escaped to the sward and breeze of the campus; there were
the troops of roistering graduates trotting about arm in arm, and singing;
he heard the mandolins on the little balconies play an old refrain and
the university cheering afterward; saw the old professor he had cared for
most of all, with the thin white hair straggling over his silken hood,
following the band in the sparse ranks of his class. And he saw his own
Commencement Day--and the station at the junction where he stood the
morning after, looking across the valley at the old towers for the last
time; saw the broken groups of his class, standing upon the platform on
the other side of the tracks, waiting for the south-bound train as he and
others waited for the north-bound--and they all sang "Should auld
acquaintance be forgot;" and, while they looked across at each other,
singing, the shining rails between them wavered and blurred as the engine
rushed in and separated them and their lives thenceforth. He filled his
pipe again and spoke to the phantoms gliding over the dust--"Seven years!"
He was occupied with the realization that there had been a man in his
class whose ambition needed no restraint, his promise was so complete--in
the strong belief of the university, a belief he could not help knowing--
and that seven years to a day from his Commencement this man was sitting
on a fence rail in Indiana.

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