“Our little town is changing so that it no longer seems familiar. Not that the change is visible. Beyond an unusual number of strangers or recent comers, there is nothing new to strike the eye. But the talk everywhere is of a new railroad and other improvements. One needs only to shut one’s eyes and listen, to imagine that the town is already a real city. Mr. Elkins seems to be the center of this new civic self-esteem. The air is full of it, and I admit that I am affected by it. I have
“‘A feeling, as when eager crowds await,
Before a palace gate,
Some wondrous pageant.’
“You are indebted to Captain Tolliver for the quotation, and to Mr. Elkins for the idea. The Captain induced me to read the book in which I found the lines. He stigmatizes the preference given to the Northern poets—Longfellow, for instance—over Timrod as ‘the crowning infamy of American letters.’ He has taken the trouble to lay out a course of study for me, the object of which is to place me right in my appreciation of the literary men of the South. It includes Pollard’s ‘Lost Cause’ and the works of W. G. Simms. I have not fully promised to follow it to the end. Timrod, however, is a treat.”
That last quiet winter will always be set apart in my memory, as a time like no other. It was a sitting down on a milestone to rest. Back of us lay the busy past—busy with trivial things, it seemed to me, but full of varied activity nevertheless. A boy will desire mightily to finish a cob-house; and when it is done he will smilingly knock it about the barn floor. So I was tearing down and leaving the fabric of relationship which I had once prized so highly.
The life upon which I expected to enter promised well. In fact, to a man of medium ability, only, and no training in large affairs, it promised exceedingly well. I knew that Jim was strong, and that his old regard for me had taken new life and a firm hold upon him. But when, removed from his immediate influence, I looked the situation in the face, the future loomed so mysteriously bizarre that I shrank from it. All his skimble-skamble talk about psychology and hypnotism, and that other rambling discourse of pirate caves and buccaneering cruises, made me feel sometimes as if I were about to form a partnership with Aladdin, or the King of the Golden Mountain. If he had asked me, merely, to come to Lattimore and go into the real estate and insurance business with him, I am sure I should have had none of this mental vertigo. Yet what more had he done?
As to the boom, I had, as yet, not a particle of objective confidence in it; but, subconsciously, I felt, as did the town “doomed to prosperity,” a sense of impending events. In spite of some presentiments and doubts, it was, on the whole, with high hopes that we, on an aguish spring day, reached Lattimore with our stuff (as the Scriptures term it), and knew that, for weal or woe, it was our home.
Jim was again at the station to meet us, and seemed delighted at our arrival. I thought I saw some sort of absent-mindedness or absorbedness in his manner, so that he seemed hardly like himself. Josie was there with him, and while she and Alice were greeting each other, I saw Jim scanning the little crowd at the station as if for some other arrival. At last, his eye told me that whatever it was for which he was looking, he had found it; and I followed his glance. It rested on the last person to alight from the train—a tall, sinewy, soldierly-built youngish man, who wore an overcoat of black, falling away in front, so as to reveal a black frock coat tightly buttoned up and a snowy shirt-front with a glittering gem sparkling from the center of it. On his head was a shining silk hat—a thing so rare in that community as to be noticeable, and to stamp the wearer as an outsider. His beard was clipped close, and at the chin ran out into a pronounced Vandyke point. His mustaches were black, heavy, and waxed. His whole external appearance betokened wealth, and he exuded mystery. He had not taken two steps from the car before the people on the platform were standing on tiptoe to see him.
“Bus to the Centropolis?” queried the driver of the omnibus.
The stranger looked at the conveyance, filled as it was with a load of traveling men and casuals; and, frowning darkly, turned to the negro who accompanied him, saying, “Haven’t you any carriage here, Pearson?”
“Yes, sah,” responded the servant, pointing to a closed vehicle. “Right hyah, sah.”