A little thing, and yet one of the greatest moments in the world’s history. It must have been Fate. Why was it that this stern man, who hated all emotion, should so have unbended at this moment? That we cannot answer. But we can conjecture. Mayhap it is this: We were all wrong; we accepted the man’s exterior and profession as the fact of his marrow.
No man can lose all emotion. The doctor, was, after all, even as ourselves—he was human. Whatever may be said, we have the certainty of that moment—and of Charley Huyck.
The sun’s rays were hot; they were burning; the pavements were intolerable; the baked air in the canyoned street was dancing like that of an oven; a day of dog-days. The boy crossing the street; his arms full of papers, and the glass bulging in his little hip-pocket.
At the curb he stopped. With such a sun it was impossible to long forget his plaything. He drew it carefully out of his pocket, lay down a paper and began distancing his glass for the focus. He did not notice the man beside him. Why should he? The round dot, the brownish smoke, the red spark and the flash of flame! He stamped upon it. A moment out of boyhood; an experimental miracle as old as the age of glass, and just as delightful. The boy had spoiled the name of a great Governor of a great State; but the paper was still salable. He had had his moment. Mark that moment.
A hand touched his shoulder. The lad leaped up. “Yessir. Star or Bulletin?”
“I’ll take one of each,” said the man. “There now. I was just watching you. Do you know what you were doing?”
“Yessir. Burning paper. Startin’ fire. That’s the way the Indians did it.”
The man smiled at the perversion of fact. There is not such a distance between sticks and glass in the age of childhood.
“I know,” he said—“the Indians. But do you know how it was done; the why—why the paper began to blaze?”
“Yessir.”