The journalist kept steadily at his work; and, as
time went on, the bitterness his predecessor’s
swindle had left him passed away. But his loneliness
and a sense of defeat grew and deepened. When
the vistas of the world had opened to his first youth,
he had not thought to spend his life in such a place
as Plattville; but he found himself doing it, and it
was no great happiness to him that the congressional
representative of the district, the gentleman whom
the “Herald’s” opposition to McCune
had sent to Washington, came to depend on his influence
for renomination; nor did the realization that the
editor of the “Carlow County Herald” had
come to be McCune’s successor as political dictator
produce a perceptibly enlivening effect on the young
man. The years drifted very slowly, and to him
it seemed they went by while he stood far aside and
could not even see them move. He did not consider
the life he led an exciting one; but the other citizens
of Carlow did when he undertook a war against the “White
Caps.” The natives were much more afraid
of the “White Caps” than he was; they
knew more about them and understood them better than
he did.
CHAPTER II
THE STRANGE LADY
It was June. From the patent inner columns
of the “Carlow County Herald” might be
gleaned the information (enlivened by cuts of duchesses)
that the London season had reached a high point of
gaiety; and that, although the weather had grown inauspiciously
warm, there was sufficient gossip for the thoughtful.
To the rapt mind of Miss Selina Tibbs came a delicious
moment of comparison: precisely the same conditions
prevailed in Plattville.
Not unduly might Miss Selina lay this flattering unction
to her soul, and well might the “Herald”
declare that “Carlow events were crowding thick
and fast.” The congressional representative
of the district was to deliver a lecture at the court-house;
a circus was approaching the county-seat, and its
glories would be exhibited “rain or shine”;
the court had cleared up the docket by sitting to
unseemly hours of the night, even until ten o’clock—one
farmer witness had fallen asleep while deposing that
he “had knowed this man Hender some eighteen
year”—and, as excitements come indeed
when they do come, and it seldom rains but it pours,
the identical afternoon of the lecture a strange lady
descended from the Rouen Accommodation and was greeted
on the platform by the wealthiest citizen of the county.
Judge Briscoe, and his daughter, Minnie, and (what
stirred wonder to an itch almost beyond endurance)
Mr. Fisbee! and they then drove through town on the
way to the Briscoe mansion, all four, apparently, in
a fluster of pleasure and exhilaration, the strange
lady engaged in earnest conversation with Mr. Fisbee
on the back seat.
