His grin was infectious and Taylor answered it, dropping his suitcase and looking the other straight in the eyes.
“Norton,” he said, “what in hell is the cause of all this staring at me? Can’t a man leave town for a few days and come back without everybody looking at him as though he were a curiosity?”
Norton—a tall, slender, sinewy man with broad shoulders—laughed aloud and deliberately winked at several interested citizens who had followed Taylor’s progress across the platform, and who now stood near him, grinning.
“You are a curiosity, man. You’re the first mayor of this man’s town! Lordy,” he said to the surrounding faces, “he hasn’t tumbled to it yet!”
The color left Taylor’s face; he stared hard at Norton; he gazed in bewilderment at the faces near him.
“Mayor?” he said. “Why, good Lord, man, I wasn’t here yesterday!”
“But your friends were!” yelped the delighted Norton. He raised his voice, so that it reached far into the crowd on the street:
“He’s sort of fussed up, boys; this honor being conferred on him so sudden; but give him time and he’ll talk your heads off!” He leaned over to Taylor and whispered in his ear.
“Grin, man, for God’s sake! Don’t stand there like a wooden man; they’ll think you don’t appreciate it! It’s the first time I ever saw you lose your nerve. Buck up, man; why, they simply swamped Danforth; wiped him clean off the map!”
Norton was whispering more into Taylor’s ear, but Taylor could not follow the sequence of it, nor get a coherent meaning out of it. He even doubted that he heard Norton. He straightened, and looked around at the crowd that now was pressing in on him, and for the first time in his life he knew the mental panic and the physical sickness that overtakes the man who for the first time faces an audience whose eyes are focused on him.