When Ellis went away it was to the sound of jollity. He came back to a
town shrouded in mourning. Every store was closed, and symbols of
grief adorned most of them. Wat Harlow, with a delicacy Ellis would
scarcely have expected of him, had ordered purple ribbon and white
flowers to tie with the crape. Silent and grief-stricken, the town
stood waiting the arrival of the train. When it came, the coffin was
lifted by loving hands and carried the ten long blocks to the church.
No cold hearse rattled his precious body, but, even as the body of
Robert Louis Stevenson was held by human touch until the last office
was done, so was Ellis Hinton, the country printer, carried to his last
repose by the hands of his friends.
Not until Jap looked for a long, anguished moment upon the
flower-massed grave did he realize that he was alone, that he was
drifting, that he had no anchor. Something of this he expressed to
Flossy, between dry sobs, when they had left Ellis alone in the
secluded little cemetery. Her eyes burned with a strange, maternal
light as she comforted the boy whose grief was of the fibre of her own.
"Ellis knew that you would feel that way," she said gently, "and
because of that, he made a will that is to be read to-night. Wat
Harlow has it. Until it is read, I want you not to trouble."
That evening, with all the important men of the town assembled in the
big front room of the _Herald_ office, Wat Harlow read brokenly the
last "reading notice" of Bloomtown's sleeping hero. It was written in
the familiar scrawl that everybody knew, with scarcely a waver in its
lines to tell that a dying hand had penned it:
"I am going a long journey, but not so far that I cannot vision your
growth. It was the labor of love to plan for this time. In the
gracious wisdom of God it was not intended that I should enjoy it with
you; but as Moses looked into his promised land, so through the eyes of
the _Herald_ I have seen mine. And God, in His wonderful way, has sent
you another optimist to do the royal work of upbuilding a town.
"My town, my people, I leave to you the greatest gift I have to offer.
I give you my boy, Jap. He is worthy. Hold up his hands, in memory of
"ELLIS HINTON."
As Harlow folded the paper, with hands that trembled, he was not
conscious of the fact that hot tears were streaming down his cheeks.
There was an instant of tense silence. Then Tom Granger walked over to
the boy who lay, face downward across the table, arms outspread in
abandon of grief. He took one limp hand in his, and a voiceless
message went from heart to heart. Jap aroused himself. One by one the
men of Bloomtown filed by. No word was spoken, but each man pledged
himself to Ellis Hinton as he took the hand of Ellis's boy in a firm
clasp. When the others had gone, Wat Harlow remained.
For a moment he stood silent beside the table. Then with a cry of
utter heartbreak, he sank to his knees and permitted the bereaved boy
to give vent to his long-repressed agony in a saving flood of tears.
When they left the office together, there had been welded a friendship
that was stronger than years of any other understanding could have
given.
Flossy went back to the cottage, and, like the brave helpmeet of such a
man as Ellis Hinton must have been, did not sadden the days with her
grief. Sometimes, in the little arbor, with J. W. playing at her feet,
she sang softly over her sewing:
"Beautiful isle of Somewhere,
Isle of the true, where we live anew,
Beautiful isle of Somewhere."
It was her advice that caused the boys to fit up a bedroom and
living-room on the second floor of the office. It was her idea that
separated Bill from the unsteady air of his home. The Judge, heeding
the scriptural injunction implied in the immortal words of Moses, "It
is not good that man should be alone," had taken unto himself a fourth
wife, and Bill had so many rows with his latest stepmother that there
was no opposition to the change. Tom Granger observed that it had been
so many matrimonial moons since Bill had a mother that he did not know
whether he had any real kinfolks at all. It was certain that he knew
little of the real meaning of the word "home." Flossy boarded them,
and her cottage was their haven of refuge during many a long evening.
It was sad comfort, and yet it was the surest comfort, to have her live
over again those last days in the mountains, when Ellis's thoughts
bridged space and visualized the rebuilding of Bloomtown.
Perhaps Flossy sensed the fact that these evenings were bone and sinew
to Jap's manhood. The boy, never careless, was changing to a man of
purpose, such as would be the product of Ellis Hinton's training. The
stray, born of the union of purposeless, useless Jacky Herron, and
Mary, peevish and fretful, changeable and inconstant, had been born
again into the likeness of the man who bad been almost a demigod to him.
The town was growing, as Ellis had prophesied, and was creeping in
three directions across the prairie. It incorporated and began to
settle into regular lines. Spring street showed but few gaps in the
line of cottages that ran almost all the way from the rear of Blanke's
drug store to Flossy's home, and another line of modest cottages looked
at them from the other side of the street. A new and fashionable
residence place was laid out, in the extreme south end of town, as far
from the grime and soot of the railroad as possible; but the
substantial old families still clung to their ancestral halls in the
vicinity of Court House Square.
One day in early spring Bill burst into the office, his reporter's pad
flapping wildly. His brown eyes danced.
"Big doings!" he shouted. "Pap's going to run for mayor, and he wants
the _Herald_ to voice the cry of the town for his services."
"Who said so?" queried Jap, sticking away at the last legislative
report.
"Nobody but him--as far as I can find out," Bill returned, grinning
knowingly. "It seems that they had a mess of turnip greens, from
cellar sprouts, and they gave him cramps. He was dozing under
paregoric when the idea hit him. It grew like the turnip sprouts, fast
but pale. He wants us to water the sprouts and give 'em air, so that
they'll get color in them."
"How much did he send in for the color?" asked Jap, climbing down
interestedly.
The Associate Editor flashed a two-dollar bill.
"I told Pap that if any opposition sprouted, he'd have to raise the
ante," he remarked. "He squealed loud enough when I squeezed him for
this, but I convinced him that we had about done away with charity
practice. Told him the _Herald_ was out of the amateur class, and
after this election the ante 'd be five bones."
"Well," conceded Jap, "as he is Flossy's brother, we'll have to spread
it on thick for the low price of introduction. Look up that woodcut of
Sames, the Chautauqua lecturer. If you'll chisel off the beard, we can
use it for the Judge. I think that we will kill that story you cribbed
from the St. Louis _Republic_, about the President's morning canter
with his family physician, and run the Judge along the first column.
By the way, Bill, it would be a good idea to trace his career from
joyous boyhood to the dignity of the judicial office. What judge was
he? Since I have known him, he has never 'worked at the bench.'"
Bill grinned wickedly.
"He was judge of live stock at the county fair!"
"Fallen is Caesar!" Jap exploded. "What can we say about him?"
"Nothin' for certain, as Kelly Jones says," Bill lamented.
"I never tried fiction," Jap averred, "but for the honor of the first
aspirant to the office of Mayor of Bloomtown, and the greater glory of
our Associate Editor, I am going to plunge."
And plunge he did. When the town read the eulogium that Jap spread
upon the front page of the _Herald_ it gasped as from a sudden cold
plunge, sat up, rubbed its eyes, and concluded that it had somehow
failed to understand or appreciate its foremost son. Hollins, the
leading grocer, and Bolton, the furniture dealer, had felt the itch for
office; and Marquis, the attorney, had stood in his doorway for a week
awaiting the delegation that would press upon him the nomination; but
all these aspirants faded like poppies in the wake of the reaper.
Nobody could be found to buck a sure thing, such as Judge Bowers,
backed by the power of the press.
The week after election, the _Herald_ sported fifty small flags through
its columns, and quoted Wat Harlow's speech in which he declared that
Judge William Hiram Bowers was "the noblest Roman of them all." For
which Bill accounted to Jap by the astute observation that Rome was a
long way off. The Judge hardly caught Wat's meaning, and came into the
office to protest.
"I am afeard that folks 'll think we have Catholic blood in the
family," he complained, shaking the paper nervously.
"Mystery is the blood of progress, Pap," assured Bill gravely. "If you
will notice, the men that get there always have a skeleton rattling a
limb now and then."
"Mis' Bowers don't like it," he objected. "I had to quit the
Methodists and be immersed in the Baptists afore she'd have me, and now
she's fairly tearin' up the wind over this talk about me bein' a Roman.
You gotta correct it!"
"We have given you a hundred dollars' worth of advertising for a measly
two-dollar bill," declared Jap emphatically. "The columns of the
_Herald_ are free to news. Advertising at our regular rates. Bill
will give you particulars."
"Dollar an inch for display," crisped Bill; "ten cents a line for
readers." He seated himself, pencil in band, as he added, "payable in
advance."
"Make a flat rate of ten dollars, as it is the Judge," advised Jap
judicially.
The Mayor-elect decided to let it alone; but Jap mentioned the fact, in
the next issue of the _Herald_, that Judge Bowers had alleged that he
was born in New England, of Puritan stock, and had no Italian
sympathies--which lucid statement abundantly satisfied Judge and Mrs.
Bowers, but set the town to wondering what the Judge was hiding in the
dim annals of his past.