A fevered search back stage netted two bottles, dusty and smelling of turpentine and gin, respectively. Mr. Pottle grasped their necks and clinked them together with resounding clinks. The effect on Agnes was electrical. From utter immobility she started with a startled hop. The unready Mr. Gulick, Junior, after one mad grasp at her mane, rolled ignominiously from her broad back, and landed on the stage in a position that was undignified for a Revere and positively painful for a Gulick. Agnes bolted to the wings. The curtain darted down.
The audience seemed to take this occurrence in a spirit of levity, but not so Mrs. Pottle. Hot tears gathered in her eyes.
"That wretch would have a white horse," she said. "They would put Paul Revere's Ride in. Now look. Now look!"
"There, there, honey," said Mr. Pottle, between sympathetic teeth. "We'll fix 'em."
The pageant pursued its more or less majestic way, but as the history of Granville was unfolded, scene upon scene, it became all too apparent to Mrs. Pottle that her poetic opus could not recapture the first serious mood of the audience. It positively jeered when Miss Eltruda Gulick announced that she was the Spirit of the Bogardus Canal. But it grew more interested as the curtain slid up on the battle scene. This, Mrs. Pottle felt, was her dramatic masterpiece. There lay the peaceful pioneer settlement—artfully fashioned from paste-board—while the simple but virile settlers strolled up and down the embryo Main Street and exchanged couplets. The chief settler, an adipose young man with a lisp, was Mr. Gurnee Gulick, until then noted as the most adept practitioner of the modern dance-steps in that part of Ohio. Through a beard, he announced, falsetto,
"I give thee greeting, neighbor Gulick,
Upon this blossom-burgeoning morning,
I trust 'tis not the wily red-skin
I just heard whooping in the forest."
His trust was misplaced. It was, indeed, the wily red-skin in the persons of Mr. Edward Brannigan—known to intimates as "Beansy," and nine of his fellow horseshoe makers who had been hired to impersonate red-men, in rather loose-fitting brown cotton skins. Mr. Brannigan and fellow red-skins had done their part dutifully at rehearsals, and had permitted themselves to be knocked down, cuffed about a bit, and finally put to inglorious rout by the settlers. But on the fateful night of the pageant, while waiting for their turn to appear, they had passed the moments with a jug of cider that was standing with reluctant feet at that high point in its career where it has ceased to be sweet and has not yet become vinegar. That was no reason why they should not do their part, for it was not an intricate one. They were to rush on, with whoops, be annihilated, and retire in confusion.
They did rush on with whoops that left nothing to be desired from the standpoint of realism. Mrs. Pottle, tense in the wings, was congratulating herself that one scene at least had dramatic strength. It was at this moment that Mr. Brannigan, as Chief Winipasuki, sachem of the Algonquins, encountered Mr. Gulick, the principal settler. In his enthusiasm, Mr. Gulick over-acted his part. He smote the red-skin warrior so earnestly on the ear that Mr. Brannigan described a parabola and dented a papier-mache rock with his hundred and seventy pounds of muscular body. His part called for him to lie there, prone and impotent, while the settlers drove off his band.
It may have been a sudden rebellion of a proud spirit. It may have been the wraith of history in protest; it may have been an inherently perverse nature; or it may have been the cider. In any event, Chief Winipasuki got to his feet, war-whooped, and knocked the principal settler through the paste-board wall of the block-house. Those in the audience who were fond of realism enjoyed what ensued immensely. The settlers of the town, who were the nice young men, and the Indians, who were not so nice but were strong and willing, had at one another, and although they had only nature's weapons, the battle, as it waged up and down and back and through the shattered scenery, was stirring enough. When the curtain was at last brought down, Chief Winipasuki had a half-nelson on Settler Gulick, who was calling in a loud penetrating voice for the police.
In all the hub-bub and confusion, in all the delirium of the audience, Mr. Pottle remained calm enough to note that a miracle had taken place; Mr. Felix Winterbottom was chuckling. It was a dry, unpracticed chuckle at best, but it was a chuckle, nevertheless. Mr. Pottle was observing the phenomenon with wide eyes when he felt his elbow angrily plucked.