Jared followed the other's quick nod.
"Why," said Jared, "it's Doctor—Doctor——"
"Dr. Gowdy," supplied the clerk. "The Rev. William S. Gowdy, D. D.," he continued, amplifying. "He's the king-pin."
"The Rev. William S. Gow——" repeated Jared. The title-page of Onward and Upward flashed suddenly before his eyes. The man to whom he owed his earliest quickening impulse, the man whose book had shone before his vision like a first light in a great darkness, stood there almost within reach of his grateful hand. He stepped forward to introduce himself and to voice his obligations.
But Dr. Gowdy, with what, to a disinterested spectator, would have seemed a final gesture of utter rejection and condemnation, turned on his heel and stalked down a long corridor, with his country members (who were prepared to like the Squash, but now no longer dared) pattering and shuffling behind.
"Of all the false and mistaken things! Of all the odious daubs!" purled Dr. Gowdy to his cowed and abashed following. For Dr. Gowdy, town-bred and town-born, had no sympathy for ill-considered rusticity, and was too rigorous a purist to give any quarter to such a discordant mingling of the simulated and the real.
"I've never seen anything worse," he continued, as he swept his party on; "unless it's that." He pointed to another painting past which they were moving—a den of lions behind real bars. "That's the final depth," he said.
The country parsons, left to themselves, would have admired the ingenuity of this zoological presentation, but Dr. Gowdy's intimidating strictures froze their appreciation. They pattered and shuffled along all the faster.
Meanwhile Jared, proud to have awakened the interest of the "Rev. Gowdy" (as the reading of the Ringgold County Gazette had taught him to express it), was busy whirling the leaves of the hotel's directory to learn the good man's address.