I SAT up in the smoking-car all night, straight as a cob, making myself
as small as I could on one of the side seats nearest the door. I was not
used to riding on a railroad train. At every stop, when men came in
and looked at me in passing, my heart jumped. Things had been happening
pretty fast in my case. In the upheaval of my feelings, I was not
exactly sure just what special crime I had committed. I merely knew that
I felt like a combination of coward, renegade, and malefactor.
The idea which stuck most painfully in my crop was the certain knowledge
of what everybody in Levant would be saying--“He had to skip the town!”
That’s a mighty mean tag to be tied to a chap when it’s tied on by a
country community; it never comes off. Even if he makes good in fine
shape some old blatherskite is always ready to shift his chaw and drool,
“Maybe he’s all right _now_--but ye have to remember that he had to skip
the town!”