Much of this might have been remedied by kindly application of educational or parental rod, but young Mr. Rawn remained largely unchastened. His parents did not care to punish him, and his teacher did not dare to do so. Was he not the minister's son? If his mother had misgivings they were well concealed. She herself only shuddered in her soul when she heard the orotund voice of the master of the house explain, in contemplation of his first born, "How much he is like me!" Yes, he was like. His mother knew how like.

II

At that time and in that part of the country this little western village might have been called almost a little world of itself. Estimates of men and affairs were such only as might grow out of the soil. The great world beyond was a thing but vaguely sensed of any who dwelt here. The town was apart from the nearest railway, in a section where rural simplicity amounted at times almost to frontier savagery. Now and then a lynching broke the quiet of the community. The local vices and virtues came out of a life but recently individual and unrestrained. It seemed only chance that young Rawn did not run wild, like many other of the youth of that town, who, trained by custom in arms and excess, disappeared from time to time, passing on to the frontier, then not remote.

Why did not John Rawn naturally trend toward violence, why did the frontier not call out to him? There was one great reason—he was a coward.

Cowardice is a trait sometimes handed down from father to son, indeed most usually it comes of heredity or ill-health. Sometimes it is fought down by reason, sometimes it is long concealed by artifice. Often it is hidden behind physical stature. Most frequently it is left unsuspected, sheltered behind an air of dignity. Money conceals much of it. Young Rawn was much like his father before him. Perhaps his father never had stopped to think that personal conclusions were matters he had never been called upon to carry to an end with any fellow-man. Peter Cartwright was no saint of his. There was no need, in his belief, to put spiritual or mental questions to the acid and unpleasant test of physical contact. The son, given by nature a considerable stature and gravity for his years, continued in the same fiction, not suspecting that it was fiction. There were larger boys than he, but chivalry restrained these. There were smaller boys than he, but these feared him by reason of the valor which it was supposed he owned. The ranks of life opened before him readily and easily. He stalked forward, with small opposition, accepted at his own estimate of himself; as presently we shall set forth in many valuable instances.

III

It may be supposed that, in a rural community of this sort, living was cut down pretty much to the bone of actual necessities. There was no excess of comfort, and, although there was little lack, luxury was a thing undreamed. Transportation was in that day costly and inefficient, the world not so small then as it is now, so that there was less interchange of the products of distant countries and localities. For instance, there were orange groves within three hundred miles of this little village, yet rarely was an orange to be seen there. Flour, salt, coffee, bacon, Bibles, six-shooters, essential things, were carried thither, not luxuries and trifles. The family was its own world. In large part, it tilled its own fields and ran its own factories. Mrs. Rawn molded the candles which made the bedroom lights and those by which she sewed—though not that by which her husband read and wrote—in a kettle in the backyard at butchering times, when suet came the parson's way. She made her husband's long black coats, building them upon some prehistoric pattern. She made, mended and washed his shirts, hemmed his stocks and darned his socks for him. Using the outworn ministerial cloth in turn, she made also, in due time, the garments of the son and heir, even building for him a cap, with ear-lappets, for winter use. Her own garments might have been seen by the most casual eye to have been the product of her own hands. Yet, this home was not much different from others, where countless things then were done domestically which now are fabricated in factories and purchased through many middlemen. The lockstep of our civilization was not then so fully in force.

Money was a rare commodity in any such community, and any manner of personal indulgence was for but few. If, for instance, there was beef on the parsonage table, it was the parson alone who ate it, not his wife. Once he came home with two lemons, which had been given him, perhaps as a peace-offering, by a generous storekeeper. These he ordered made forthwith into lemonade; the which, forthwith also, he himself drank, offering none to the sharer of his joys; nor did she find anything either unusual or reproach-worthy in this act. You wonder at these things? They happened in another day, among people with whom you could not be expected to be familiar—your fathers and mothers; persons not in the least of our class.

IV

In these circumstances—since we have promised value in some specific instance—a certain interest attaches to a little event which nowhere else, save in some such village, would have been noted or could have been possible. The leading local merchant, in a burst of enterprise, had imported a couple of clusters of bananas from New Orleans, the first ever brought into the town. For a time none of the citizens purchased, and, indeed, it required the grudging gift of a banana or so to establish a local demand. Then—builded on the assurance of a wise and much-traveled citizen who had once eaten a banana at Fort Worth—the rumor of the bananas passed rapidly through the town. Swiftly it became an important thing to announce to a neighbor that one had eaten of this fruit. In time, even children partook thereof.