Now Dugan's music had stopped. Some one above shut a window with a clatter that echoed disproportionately loud. Then there was silence up there, tense silence, and the call of the silence was harder to resist than the music. The boy by the court-house railing could not resist it. He pushed away Willard's detaining hand, and without a word to him or another glance at him, was across the square and through the red-lighted door, and running up the stairs.
"What do you know about that?" Willard demanded, in vain. "What do you know——"
Willard, certainly, knew nothing, and gave up the attempt to understand, with a sigh.
A little later the vantage point of the court-house fence was unoccupied. Of the two boys who had occupied it, one was making a belated and rather disconsolate way toward Halloran's—the one who would be boasting to-morrow that he had spent the last fifteen minutes with Neil Donovan. The other boy stood listening outside the closed doors of the hall.
It was half an hour later and it had been an important half-hour in Odd Fellows' Hall, that uneventful but vital time when the newly made creature that is the crowd is passive, gathering its forces slowly, getting ready to fling the weight of them into one side of a balance irrevocably, if it has decisions to make; the most important half-hour of the evening if you were interested in the psychology of crowds. The Honourable Joe Grant was not. He would have said that the first speech dragged and the half-hour had been dull. Dull or significant, that half-hour was over, and Green River was waking up. In the listening hush of the hall the big moments of the evening, whatever they were to be, were creeping nearer and nearer. Now they were almost here.
The Honourable Joe had just introduced Luther Ward and heavily resumed his seat. He sat portly and erect and entirely happy behind the thin-legged, inadequate looking table that held a water pitcher, his important looking papers, and his watch. The ornately chased gold watch that had measured so many epoch-making hours for Green River was in public life again, like the Honourable Joe. He fingered it affectionately, wiped his forehead delicately from time to time with a purple silk handkerchief, followed Mr. Ward's remarks with unwavering brown eyes, and smiled his benevolent, public-spirited smile. This was his night indeed.
Behind the Honourable Joe, on the stage in a semicircular row of chairs were the speakers of the evening, and before him was Green River.
The badly proportioned little hall was not at its best to-night. It was too brightly lit and the footlights threw an uncompromising glare upon the tiny stage. Red, white, and blue cheesecloth in crude, sharp colouring draped windows and stage, making gay little splashes of colour that emphasized the dinginess of the room. Only the Grand Army flag, borrowed and draped elaborately above the stage, showed faded and thin against the brightness of the cheesecloth, but kept its dignity and kept up its claim to homage still. And the ugliness of the room was a thing to be discounted and forgotten, like some beautiful, full-blooded woman's tawdry, and ill-chosen clothes, because this room held Green River.
Green River, filling the little room to over-flowing, standing in the rear of the room, crowding every available inch of space on benches, window sills, and an emergency supply of camp chairs, impressive as that much sheer bulk of humanity, crowded between four walls, becomes impressive, and impressive in its own right, too; Green River represented as it was, with all the warring, unreconciled elements that made the town.