“You don't say so!”
“I talked him out of that, but we must make a showing, for he's good and tired, and may dump the whole business any day.”
“Well, if he does that there'll be no marrying or giving in marriage for me this summer. It will be just like a Shaker settlement where I am concerned.”
Dan laughed. “Oh, you'd be all right, Holt. You'd get something else, or the M. & W. would keep you on.”
“I don't know about that. A new management generally means a clean sweep all round, and my berth's a pretty good one.”
In some manner a rumor of the changes Oakley proposed making did get abroad, and he was promptly made aware that his popularity in Antioch was a thing of the past. He was regarded as an oppressor from whom some elaborate and wanton tyranny might be expected. While General Cornish suffered their inefficiency, his easy-going predecessors had been content to draw their salaries and let it go at that, a line of conduct which Antioch held to be entirely proper. This new man, however, was clearly an upstart, cursed with an insane and destructive ambition to earn money from the road.
Suppose it did not pay. Cornish could go down into his pocket for the difference, just as he had always done.
What the town did not know, and what it would not have believed even if it had been told, was that the general had been on the point of selling—a change that would have brought hardship to every one. The majority of the men in the shops owned their own homes, and these homes represented the savings of years. The sudden exodus of two or three hundred families meant of necessity widespread ruin. Those who were forced to go away would have to sacrifice everything they possessed to get away, while those who remained would be scarcely better off. But Antioch never considered such a radical move as even remotely possible. It counted the shops a fixture; they had always been there, and for this sufficient reason they would always remain.
The days wore on, one very like another, with their spring heat and lethargy. Occasionally, Oakley saw Miss Emory on the street to bow to, but not to speak with; while he was grateful for these escapes, he found himself thinking of her very often. He fancied—and he was not far wrong—that she was finding Antioch very dull. He wondered, too, if she was seeing much of Ryder. He imagined that she was; and here again he was not far wrong. Now and then he was seized with what he felt to be a weak desire to call, but he always thought better of it in time, and was always grateful he had not succumbed to the impulse. But her mere presence in Antioch seemed to make him dissatisfied and resentful of its limitations. Ordinarily he was not critical of his surroundings. Until she came, that he was without companionship and that the town was given over to a deadly inertia which expressed itself in the collapsed ambition of nearly every man and woman he knew, had scarcely affected him beyond giving him a sense of mild wonder.
He had heard nothing of his father, and in the pressure of his work and freshened interest in the fortunes of the Huckleberry, had hardly given him a second thought. He felt that, since he had sent money to him, he was in a measure relieved of all further responsibility. If his father did not wish to come to him, that was his own affair. He had placed no obstacle in his way.