Waterman's histrionic sense responded to the demand. With arm uplifted, he deliberated, turning slowly from side to side. He was a master of the niceties of insinuation. Innuendo he had always found more effective than direct statement. He shook his head deprecatingly, reluctant to yield to the clamor for the names of the human vultures he had been arraigning.
"Name them! Tell who they are!"
He indulged these cries with a smile of resignation. They had a right to know; but it was left for him, in his superior wisdom, to pass upon their demands.
"Hit 'em, Alec! Go for 'em!" yelled a man in the front row.
"Why," the orator resumed, "why," he asked, "should I name names that are in every mind in this intelligent audience?" There was absolute quiet as they waited for the names, which he had not the slightest intention of giving.
"Why—"
The carrying power of Phil's voice had been deplored from her earliest youth by her aunts. Her single word, flung across the heads of the auditors, splashed upon the tense silence like a stone dropped suddenly into a quiet pond.
"Put him out!" yelled some one who attributed this impiety to the usual obstreperous boy. A number of young fellows in Phil's neighborhood, who knew the source of the ejaculation, broke into laughter and jeers. Alexander Waterman knew that voice; he had seen Phil across the room, but had assumed that her presence was due to her vulgar curiosity, on which his wife had waxed wroth these many years. In his cogitations Phil was always an unaccountable and irresponsible being: it had not occurred to him that she might resent his veiled charges against her father and Amzi. Waterman, by reason of his long experience as a stump speaker, knew how to deal with interruptions. He caught up instantly the challenge Phil had flung at him.
"Coward?" he repeated. "I should like to ask you, my fellow-citizens, who is the coward in this crisis? Is it I, who face you to-day clothed in my constitutional guaranty of free and untrammeled speech, to speak upon the issues of this grave crisis; or is it the conspirators who meet in dark rooms to plot and plunder?"