Conjecture busied itself with an effort to find a solution for the mystery; for wildly, personal and audacious as journalism was in small western towns at that time, the effrontery of this stroke startled the community. One wise one suggested that Mose Harbell must have done the thing for a joke, as he had manifestly done the mackerel story in the same issue of the paper; but that theory was unanimously rejected as soon as it was observed that the article did not once call Braine "genial."
Finally the community settled down to the conviction that this was only another of Braine's devices—a trifle more startling than the others—for exciting interest in the paper, and making it a subject of universal talk.
Abner Hildreth alone understood, and he was satisfied to be silent.
VIII.
As the sun rose after his night of tramping and troubled reminiscence, Edgar Braine resolutely put the past out of his mind, and turned to the future.
"The old Edgar is dead," he said; "let us see what we can do for the new Edgar."
But before attacking that problem, he cleared his head by going out to the little shed that served him for a bath house, filling his home-made shower-bath with fresh water and drenching himself in the chill air of the June morning. When dressed, all the weariness of watching was gone, his pulse was full and his mind clear.
He called across the street and bade the negro caterer bring him a cup of coffee, and not until it came did he permit himself to think of anything more important than the beauty of the morning, and a pet scheme he had of persuading the aldermen of Thebes to offer citizens some sort of inducement to plant more permanent trees among the quick growing and quick decaying cotton-woods of the streets.
When the coffee came, he dismissed all these things, and set himself to work out some problems.