The Great Accident

by Ben Ames Williams

He hesitated, then he said swiftly: “All right. Some time. Good-by!”

He jerked his head in farewell and hurried away as though he were afraid of her. Joan watched him go, and she pressed her hand to her lips as though to still them.

CHAPTER III
ROUTT TO KITE

WHEN Wint left Joan, after their encounter on the street, he was walking in a daze. He stumbled, his head was down, his eyes were blank. He was stunned and humbled; and after he had left her, he began to feel defiant. He thought of words with which he could have crushed her and silenced her. Presuming to forgive him, to praise him. What right had she to do that anyway? He ought to have laughed at her.

Not that Wint did not love Joan. He did; but he was still, at this time, a boy and nothing more. And he had rather more than a boy’s usual measure of stubborn contrariness in him. When his father, and his mother, and Joan, and every one else he cared for had bade him mend his ways, he had refused to mend them, and the thing had been a scandal on every tongue in Hardiston. When, in like fashion, father and mother and Joan bade him go to the dogs, whither he seemed surely bound, he had braced himself, fought a good fight, begun to make good. Now Joan was telling him he had made good, that he was all right. He had a reckless desire to go to the devil, forthwith, to prove her wrong.

He had met Joan at the corner by the Star Company’s furniture store, an institution that was always holding fire sales and closing-out sales without either fires before or actual closings after. Their talk there together had not gone unremarked. Every one in town would know of it within the day. When they separated, Joan went away from town toward her home, and Wint went up Broadway toward the Court House. Not that he knew where he was going. But he had to go somewhere.

There were only one or two places in Hardiston to go to when you did not know where to go. You might go to the Smoke House, and shake dice for a cigar, or drop a nickel in the slot machine and see how your luck was running. Or you might drop in at the Post Office in the idle hope that a special train had come along with a letter for you since the last regular mail was sorted into the boxes. Or you might stop at one of the newspaper offices. The editors were always willing to talk, and there were usually two or three others there before you.

Wint headed, somewhat aimlessly, for the Post Office. But when he passed down Main Street, B. B. Beecham, editor of the Journal, called Wint in to look at proofs of some city printing. Wint always got on well with B. B. The editor never preached, he never seemed to have any particular interest in the wrong-doings of other people, he attended to his own business and let you attend to yours. A square-built man, with a big barrel of a chest and stocky shoulders, and a strong, amiable countenance. Wint went in at his hail; and B. B. got the proofs for him, and Wint began to look them over. B. B. chunked up the fire in the little round iron stove that had seen so many years of service it was disintegrating. It was bound together with wire to hold it together; and there were holes in the front of it through which the fire could be seen. The stovepipe went up at an angle like that of the leaning tower of Pisa, then made a back-handed elbow turn and ran along in a hammock of wire braces to disappear into the wall. B. B. thrust a bit of wood in through the door, down into the fire, twisted it upward, breaking up the clotted coals and ashes. Then he put on more coal, and shut the door, and the fire roared up the chimney. Wint was going over the proofs, figure by figure. They had to do with bids on a sewer contract. B. B. sat down at his desk with his back to Wint and busied himself with something.

B. B.’s desk was a roll top, its pigeonholes frazzly with letters and papers jammed into them to the bursting point. The desk itself was littered with newspapers and notes and notebooks and scratch pads made out of old order blanks. There was an old iron inkwell, a tin box full of pins, a pencil or two. In a little hexagonal glass bottle at one side, a newly hatched humming bird which had fallen from the nest and been killed was preserved in alcohol. Not so large as a bumblebee, and not nearly so impressive. For paper weight, B. B. used a witch ball, taken from the stomach of a steer that Ned Howell had butchered. A round, smooth, yellowish thing, with a hole picked in to show the hair inside. It was as big as a small orange, and looked not unlike one, save that the yellow was dull and muddy. On top of the desk were books, a big hornet’s nest, an ear of corn. There was a curiously marked squash on the open iron safe in the corner; and in the rear of the office a stand-up desk and a smaller one at which a person might sit were littered with the miscellany of B. B.’s business.

While Wint was looking over the proofs, an old darky came in from the street. A ragged old man.... Wint knew him. He lived down the creek in a log cabin, and caught catfish, and farmed a plot of ground. His hat was battered, his coat was too big for him, his trousers slumped about his slumping shoes. His name was John Marshum. He took off his hat and looked around the ceiling of the office uneasily, as though he expected it to fall, and Wint and B. B. said hello to him, and he said: