“But what a blow it must have been to him to find himself swamped by a sea of indifference!” I said—"not a soul to share his views!"
“It is that sort of thing that makes the South a jest to me,” continued Franklin. “I can’t stand it.”
His face was quite sour, much more so than I had seen it on any other occasion on this tour.
“Oh, well,” I said, “those things adjust themselves in the long run. Frank is dead, but who knows, lynching may be killed by this act. The whole North and West is grieved by this. They will take it out of the South in contempt and money. Brutality must pay for itself like a stone flung in the water, if no more than by rings of water. The South cannot go on forever doing this sort of thing.”
After we had raged sufficiently we rode on, for by now Speed had finished his lunch. Here, following that lake road I have mentioned, we were in an ideal realm for a time again, free of all the dreary monotony of the land farther south. The sun shone, the wind blew, and we forgot all about Frank and careened along the shore looking at the tumbling waves. Once we climbed down a steep bank and stood on the shore, expatiating on how fine it all was. Another time we got off to pick a few apples ready to our hand. There were many detours and we passed a fair sized town called Huron, basking in a blaze of afternoon light, but for once not stopping because it lay a little to the right of our road to Sandusky. In another hour we were entering the latter place, a clean, smooth paved city of brick and frame cottages, with women reading or sewing on doorsteps and porches, and a sense of American solidarity and belief in all the virtues hovering over it all.
CEDAR POINT, LAKE ERIE
A Norse Sky
I never knew until I reached there and beheld it with my own eyes that Sandusky has near it one of the finest fresh water beaches in the world—and I have seen beaches and beaches and beaches, from those at Monte Carlo, Nice and Mentone to those that lie between Portland, Maine, and New Brunswick, Georgia. It is called Cedar Point, and is not much more than twenty minutes from the pier at the foot of Columbus Avenue, in the heart of the city—if you go by boat. They have not been enterprising enough as yet to provide a ferry for automobiles. Once you get there by a very roundabout trip of twelve miles, you can ride for seven miles along a cement road which parallels exactly the white sand of the beach and allows you to enjoy the cool lake winds and even the spray of the waves when the wind is high. It is backed by marsh land, some of which has been drained and is now offered as an ideal and exclusive residence park.
But the trip was worth the long twelve miles—splendidly worth it—once we had made up our minds to return there,—for coming we had passed it without knowing it. What induced us to go was a number of picture cards we saw in the principal department store here, showing Cedar Point Beach in a storm, Cedar Point Beach crowded with thousands of bathers, Cedar Point Beach Pier accommodating three or four steamers at once, and so forth, all very gay and summery and all seeming to indicate a world of Monte Carloesque proportions.
As a matter of fact, it was nothing like Monte Carlo or any other beach, except for its physical beauty as a sea beach, for how could a watering place on a lake in Ohio have any of the features of a cosmopolitan ocean resort? In spite of the fact that it boasted two very large hotels, a literally enormous casino and bathing pavilion, and various forms of amusement pavilions, it was without the privilege of selling a drop of intoxicants, and its patrons, to the number of thousands, were anything but smart—just plain, Middle West family people.