Therefore, Nelson Haley felt free to take the incident—and nobody had been more vitally interested in it than himself—for the text of a speech that he made in the big tent only a week or so before Town Meeting Day.
Nelson stood up before the audience and told the story simply—told of the robbery and of how he had felt when he was accused of it, sketching his own agony and shame while for weeks and months he had not been under suspicion. "I did not believe the bad influence of liquor selling could touch me, because I had nothing to do with it," he said. "But I have seen the folly of that opinion."
He pointed out, too, the present remorse and punishment of young Jack Besmith. Then he told them frankly that the blame for all—for Jack's misdeed, his own suffering, and the criminal's final situation—lay upon the consciences of the men who had made liquor selling in Polktown possible.
It was an arraignment that stung. Those deeply interested in the cause of prohibition cheered Nelson to the echo. But one man who sat well back in the audience, his hat pulled over his eyes, and apparently an uninterested listener, slipped out after Nelson's talk and walked and fought his conscience the greater part of that night.
Somehow the school teacher's talk—or was it Janice Day's scorn?—had touched Mr. Cross Moore in a vulnerable part.
Had the Summer visitors to Polktown been voters, there would have been little doubt of the Town Meeting voting the hamlet "dry." But there seemed to be a large number of men determined not to have their liberties, so-called, interfered with.
Lem Parraday's bar had become a noisy place. Some fights had occurred in the horse sheds, too. And on the nights the railroad construction gang came over to spend their pay, the village had to have extra police protection.
Frank Bowman was doing his best with his men; but they were a rough set and he had hard work to control them. The engineer was a never-failing help in the temperance meetings, and nobody was more joyful over the clearing up of Nelson Haley's affairs than he.
"You have done some big things these past few months, Janice Day," he said with emphasis.
"Nonsense, Frank! No more than other people," she declared.