There were a dozen customers in the store, but neither Jap nor Isabel knew it. And it is to the credit of Bloomtown that they all looked the other way, as they hurriedly transacted their business and departed. Blanke declared afterward that he filled fifteen prescriptions with epsom salts in his abstraction, and accidentally cured Doc Horton's best paying patient. Moss, the paper hanger, went out with his rolls of paper, and hung the border on the walls, instead of the siding. The mistakes reported were legion; but the town was all courting Isabel with Jap, at heart.
Bill rambled into the bank and suggested that Tom go over to Blanke's and lead Jap and Isabel out, as Blanke might want to close the store. Half an hour later Tom came from the drug store, with an arm locked with each of the glowing pair. Straight across Main street they marched, and down the shady walk that flanked the little park until they were opposite the front gate of the Granger home. Then they went in to break the news to Isabel's invalid mother.
Flossy heard about it, almost before Jap had awakened to his own joy, and he never knew of the hour she spent in passionate grief. In some vague way it seemed to tear open the old wound. Without knowing why, she resented the fact that Isabel's brunette beauty had won Jap. She told herself that it was not a fitting match for him. Flossy, in her maternal soul, had looked to heights undreamed of by the retiring boy. She had planned a future for him that would be sadly hampered by marriage with a village belle. But only smiles met him when he brought Isabel to her, his plain features glorified by joy in her possession.
Somehow the story of Jap Herron, the youthful Mayor of Bloomtown, his advent in its environs, and the story of his romance with the banker's daughter, crept into the country press, was carried over into the city papers and flung broadcast, so that friend and foe might seek him out. One dreary fall day, when the rain was beating sullenly down on the sodden leaves, a haggard, dirty woman straggled into the office.
"I'm lookin' for Jasper Herron," she mumbled. "They told me I'd find him in here."
Jap looked at her in horror. His heart sank.
"I am his poor old mother, that he run away from and left to starve," she said viciously.
And Jap, just on the threshold of his greatest happiness, was turned aside by this grizzly, drunken phantom from the past.