"But we are with him no longer. We know him now no more——"
He mourned him as a son gone astray, as a follower after vain gods. I remember just how Nort looked when he read this part of the editorial some time afterward, glancing up quickly. "Isn't it great! Doesn't it make you think of old King David: 'Oh, my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom!'"
But the editorial was not all mournful. It closed with a triumphant note. There was no present call to be discouraged about the nation or the Grand Old Party. Leaders might come and go, but the party of Lincoln, the party of Grant, the party of Garfield, with undiminished lustre, would march ever onward to victory.
"The Star," he writes, "will remain faithful to its allegiance. The Star is old-line Republican, Cooper Union Republican—the unchanging Republicanism of the great-souled McKinley and of Theodore Roosevelt—before his apostasy."
It was wonderful! No editorial ever published in the Hempfield Star or, so far as I could learn, in any paper in the county, was ever as widely copied throughout the country as this one—copied, indeed, by some editors who did not know or love the old Captain as we did.
After such a stormy morning it was wonderful to see how quickly the troubled atmosphere of the Star began to clear. Four rather sheepish-looking men began to work with a complete show of absorption, while Anthy acted as though nothing had happened.
But there was one thing still on her mind. When I started for home, toward noon, she followed me out on the little porch.
"David," she said, "I want to speak to you."
"I want you to find Norton Carr."