Powell smoked thoughtfully for a moment and then began:
“When I was going to the law school in Cincinnati, there was a young fellow in my class—a great friend of mine. He was poor, and I was poor—God! how poor we were!” Powell paused in this retrospect of poverty. “That was why we were such friends,—our poverty gave us a common interest. This fellow came from up in Hardin County; he was tall, lean and gawky, the worst jay you ever saw. When we had graduated, I supposed he would go home, maybe to Kenton—that was his county-seat. When we were bidding each other good-by—I’ll never forget the day, it was June, hot as hell; and we had left the old law school in Walnut Street and were standing there by the Tyler-Davidson fountain in Fifth Street. I said, ‘Well, we’ll see each other once in a while; we won’t be far apart.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know about that.’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m going to Chicago.’ I looked at him in surprise. He was out at the elbows then, and had hardly enough money to get home on. Then the ridiculousness of it struck me, and I laughed. ‘Why, you’ll starve to death there!’ I said. He only smiled.” Powell paused, to whet Marley’s appetite, perhaps, for the foregone dénouement.
“That jay,” Powell said, when he had allowed sufficient time to elapse, “that jay I laughed at is Judge Johnson, of the United States Circuit Court.”
The story saddened Marley. With his faculty of conceiving a whole drama at once, he caught in an instant the trials Judge Johnson had gone through before he won to his station of ease and honor; he saw the privations, the sacrifices, the hardships, the endless strivings, plottings, schemings; it wearied and depressed him; his frightened mind hung back, clung to the real, the present, the known, found a relief in picturing the seeming security of a man like Wade Powell, in a town where he knew everybody and was known by everybody. He shrank from hearing more of the judge; he wished to stay with his thought in Macochee.
“How do young men get a start in places like Macochee?” he asked, and then he added in despairing argument: “They do stay, they do get along somehow, they make livings, and raise families; the town grows and does business, the population increases, it doesn’t die off.”
“Well,” said Wade Powell, approaching the problem with the generalities its mystery demanded, “some of them marry rich women, but that industry is about played out now; the fortunes are divided up; some of them, most of them, are content to eke out small livings, clerking in stores and that kind of thing; about the only ones that get ahead any are traders; they barter around, first in one business, then in another; they run a grocery, then sell it out and buy a livery-stable; then they dabble in real estate a while; finally they skin some one out of a farm and then they go on skinning, a little at a time; by the time they’re old, people forget their beginnings and they become respectable; then they join the church, like Selah Dudley.”
Powell stopped a moment, then he began again.
“The lawyers get along God knows how; the doctors, well, they never starve, for people will get sick, or think they’re sick, which is better yet; then there are a few preachers who are supported in a poor way by their congregations. When a man fails, he goes into the insurance business.”
Powell smoked contemplatively for a few moments.
“Sometimes,” he resumed presently, “I feel as if I were tottering on the verge of the insurance business myself.”