"Good boy. Say—" Mr. Willard Nash lowered his voice as he made this daring suggestion—"we'll go around to Halloran's, and get into a little game."
His invitation was not accepted.
"Jerry Dugan's not dead yet," observed Willard presently.
Strains of a deservedly popular waltz tune, heard from inside the hall, gave faint but unmistakable proof of this. Willard kept time with his feet as he listened, paying the tune the tribute of silence, a rare one from him. Standing so, the two were sharply contrasted figures, though the flickering lamps in the square threw only faint light here, and showed them darkly outlined against the railing, as they leaned there side by side. Pose, carriage, every movement and turn of the head were different, as different as a bulky and overgrown child is from a boy turning into a man.
"Some night," Willard repeated, unanswered, but unchilled by it, "and some crowd."
The hall had been filling fast. Though the waltz still swung its faint challenge into the night, so much of Green River had responded to it already that now it was arriving only by twos and threes. But the groups still followed each other fast under the big globe of light at the entrance door, gayly shaded with red for the occasion, and up the bare, clattering stairs to the floor above, and the hall.
Willard was right, more right than he knew. There was a crowd up there, a crowd as Willard did not understand the word; a crowd with a tone and temper of its own and a personality of its own. It was subject to laws of its own and could think and feel for itself, and its thoughts and feelings were made up of the brain stuff of every person in it, but different from them all. It was a newly created thing, a new factor in the world, and like all crowds it was born for one evening, to live for that evening only, and do its work and die.
Upstairs behind closed doors, such a crowd was forming; getting ready to think its own thoughts and act and feel, and so many houses, little and big, had emptied themselves to contribute to it, so many family discussions like the Saxons' had gone on as a prelude to it, that you might fairly say the crowd up there was Green River.
Willard, watching the late arrivals and commenting upon them to Neil, still an uncommunicative audience, was vaguely stirred.
"This gets me," he conceded. "There's something about old Dugan's music that always gets me. For two cents, I'd go in. I sat through a patent medicine show there last week, because I didn't have the sense to stay away. It always gets me when there is anything doing in the hall. And—" he paused, heavily testing his powers of self-analysis, "it gets me," he brought out at length, "more to-night than it ever did before. It—gets me."