“'Leven o'clock!” he yawned. “I must have been asleep two hours. Guess you'll want to get right up to bed, won't you? I reckon you found out Kilo don't want no books this trip, Sammy; an' if you want to git an early start from town you'll need all the sleep you can get.”
Eliph' tossed his package on the desk carelessly.
“Why, yes, Jim, I wish you WOULD call me early,” he said. “I'll be ready for bed in half an hour or so. I done a little business up yonder, and I want to mail my report to New York. But you needn't hitch up my horse in the morning.”
“No?” asked the landlord sleepily.
“No,” said Eliph', “and if any feller comes this way selling books in the next month or so, just tell him there ain't no use for a raw hand to waste time in this town. Tell him Eliph' Hewlitt has settled down to live here.”
CHAPTER VII. The Colonel
When Eliph' Hewlitt stepped out of the hotel the next morning, after he had eaten his breakfast, and stood, with a wooden toothpick between his lips, looking up and down the street, he felt a sense of exultation. If he had been a victorious general, and Kilo a captured city of great importance, he would have had a similar feeling. Already he felt that, if he was not the captor of the town, he was one of its important citizens, and practically the husband of an attractive woman whose father owned sufficient property to be one of those who grumble about taxes.
To a man who had been a wanderer all his life it was pleasant to feel that he was soon to be kin to all the things he saw on Main Street, brother to the town-pump and cousin to the flag pole, and to consider that even the well-gnawed hitching rails were to be part of his future years. He nodded across the street to Billings, the grocer and general store man, as if he was an old acquaintance, and he watched Skinner, the butcher, sweeping the walk, with a pleasant smile, for he saw in him a future friend. He loved Kilo, and he was ready to like everything, from the post office to the creamery. His whole future seemed destined to be simple and pleasant, for he was resolved to do his best to make the town like him, and there seemed little opportunity for complications in a town that could all be seen at one glance.
Strangers think all small towns simple. The few stores are all plainly labeled, the streets run at right angles, and the houses are set well apart, like big letters in a primer. A small town looks like a story without a plot, like: “See the cat. Does the cat see me? The cat sees the dog;” beside which a city is as unfathomable as a Henry James paragraph. To the stranger each man and woman he meets is a complete individual, each standing alone, like letters on an alphabet block, and not easily to be confused, one with the other. But these letters of the small town's alphabet are often tangled into as long and complex words as those of the greatest city; it takes but twenty-six letters to spell all the passions. The letter A, that looked so distinctly separate, is soon found to be connected with C and T in Cat, and with W and R in War, as well as cross-connected with the C and W in Caw, and with T and R in Tar; while the houses that stood so seemingly alone are all connected and criss-crossed by lines of love and hate, of petty policy and revenge and pride, quite as are nations or people who live in labyrinths, or in a metropolis.