Great moments are vouchsafed only to those souls fortified to survive them. To one who had tamed the proud spirit of Sharon Whipple's hellion it was but lightsome child's play to guide this honest and amiable new bus. To the Mansion he returned in triumph with a load of passengers, driving with zest, and there receiving from villagers inflamed by tales of his prowess an ovation that embarrassed him with its heartiness. He hastened to remove the refulgent edifice, steering it prudently to its station in the stable yard. Then he went to find the defeated Starling Tucker. That stricken veteran sat alone amid the ruins of his toppled empire in the little office, slumped and torpid before the cold, rusty stove. He refused to be comforted by his devotee. He said he would never touch one of them things again, not for no man's money. The Darwinian hypothesis allows for no petty tact in the process of evolution. Starling Tucker was unfit to survive into the new age. Unable to adapt himself, he would see the Mansion's stable become a noisome garage, while he performed humble and gradually dwindling service to a few remaining horses.
Wilbur Cowan guided the Mansion's bus for two days. He longed for it as a life work, but school was on and he was not permitted to abandon this, even for a glorious life at the wheel. There came a youth in neat uniform to perform this service—described by Starling Tucker as a young squirt that wouldn't know one end of a hawse from the other. Only on Saturdays—on Saturdays openly and clandestinely on Sundays—was there present on the driver's seat a knowing amateur who could have sat there every day but for having unreasonably to learn about compound fractions and geography.
CHAPTER X
Now school was over for another summer and Trimble Cushman's dray could be driven at a good wage—by a boy overnight become a man. There were still carpers who would regard him as a menace to life and limb. Judge Penniman was among these. A large truck in sole charge of a boy—still in his teens, as the judge put it—was not conducive to public tranquillity. But this element was speedily silenced. The immature Wilbur drove the thing acceptably, though requiring help on the larger boxes of merchandise, and Trimble Cushman, still driving horses on his other truck, was proud of his employee. Moreover, the boy became in high repute for his knowledge of the inner mysteries of these new mechanisms. New cars appeared in Newbern every day now, and many of them, developing ailments of a character more or less alarming to their purchasers, were brought to his distinguished notice with results almost uniformly gratifying. He was looked up to, consulted as a specialist, sent for to minister to distant roadside failures, called in the night, respected and rewarded.
It was a new Newbern through whose thoroughfares the new motor truck of Trimble Cushman was so expertly propelled. Farm horses still professed the utmost dismay at sight of vehicles drawn by invisible horses, and their owners often sought to block industrial progress by agitation for a law against these things, but progress was triumphant. The chamber of commerce recorded immense gains in population. New factories and mills had gone up beside the little river. New people were on the streets or living in their new houses. New merchants came to meet the new demand for goods.
The homy little town was putting on airs of a great city. There was already a Better Newbern club. The view down River Street from its junction with State, Masonic Hall on the left and the new five-story Whipple block on the right, as preserved on the picture postcards sold by the Cut-Rate Pharmacy, impressed all purchasers with the town's vitality. The Advance appeared twice a week, outdoing its rival, the Star, by one issue; and Sam Pickering, ever in the van of progress, was busy with plans for making his journal a daily.
Newbern was coming on, even as boys were coming on from bare feet to shoes on week-days. Ever and again there were traffic jams on River Street, a weaving turmoil of farmers' wagons, buggies, delivery carts, about a noisy, fuming centre of motor vehicles. High in the centre would be the motor truck of Trimble Cushman, loaded with cases and nursed through the muddle by a cool, clear-eyed youth, who sat with delicate, sure hands on a potent wheel. Never did he kill or maim either citizen or child, to the secret chagrin of Judge Penniman. Traffic jams to him were a part of the day's work.
When he had performed for a little time this skilled labour for Trimble Cushman it was brought to him one day that he was old indeed. For he observed, delivering a box to Rapp Brothers, jewellery, that from the sidewalk before that establishment he was being courted by a small boy; a shy boy with bare feet and freckles who permanently exposed two front teeth, and who followed the truck to the next place of delivery. Here, when certain boxes had been left, he seated himself, as if absentmindedly, upon the remote rear of the truck and was borne to another stopping place. The truck's driver glanced back savagely at him, but not too savagely; then pretended to ignore him.