In Our Town

by William Allen White

Mrs. Handy threw herself into the work of the City Federation with passionate zeal. Also she kept up her lodge connections, and explained to the women, whom she considered of a higher social caste than the lodge women, that she was "doing it to help Mr. Handy." She did a little church work for the same reason, but her soul was in the Federation, for it insured her social status as neither lodge nor church could do. So she put herself under the protecting seal-lined wing of Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington who on account of her efforts to clean the streets we at the office had been taught by Colonel Morrison to know as the Joan of the trash-cans. And Miss Larrabee, our society reporter, told us that Mrs. Handy was the only woman in town who did not smile into her handkerchief when Mrs. Worthington, who had trained down to one hundred and ninety-seven pounds five and three-eighths ounces, gave her course of lectures on delsarte before the Federation.

It was Mrs. Handy who encouraged Mrs. Worthington to open her salon. But as there were lodge meetings the first three nights in the week, and prayer-meetings in the middle of the week, and as the choirs met for practice, and the whist clubs met for business the last of the week, the salon did not seem to take with the town, and so was discontinued. Then Mrs. Worthington and Mrs. Handy sought other fields. And the first field they stumbled into was the court-house square. For fifty years the farmers near our town had been hitching at the racks provided by the county commissioners. But Mrs. Worthington decided that the time had come for a change and that the town was getting large enough to take down the hitching-racks. So, as chairman of the Municipal Improvement section of the City Federation, Mrs. Worthington began war on the hitching-racks. At the Federation meetings for three months there were reports from committees appointed to interview the councilmen; reports of committees to interview the county commissioners—who were obdurate; reports of committees to lease new ground for the hitching rack stands; reports of the legal committee; reports of the sanitary committee, and through it all Mrs. Worthington rose at every meeting and declared that the hitching racks must be destroyed. And as she was rated in Bradstreet's report at nearly half a million dollars, her words had much force.

The town was beginning to stir itself. The merchants were with the women—because the women bought the dry goods and groceries—and we forgot about the farmers. To all this milling among the people Handy was oblivious, for he was stepping like a hen in high oats, with his eyes on a seat in Congress. Matters of mere local importance did not concern him. The railroads were for him, and the stars in their courses seemed to him to be pointing his way to Washington. He knew of the hitching-rack trouble only when he had to go with Mrs. Handy to the dinners at the Worthington home given to the councilmen and their wives, who were lukewarm on the removal proposition.

In the spring before the election of 1902 Mrs. Worthington had a majority in the council, and one Saturday night the hitching-racks were taken down by the street commissioner. And within a week the town was on the verge of civil war, for the farmers of the county rose as one man and demanded the blood of the offenders. But Abner Handy knew nothing of the disturbance. The county attorney had the street commissioner and his men arrested for trespassing upon county property; farmers threatened to boycott the town. But Abner Handy's ear was attuned to higher things. Merchants who had signed the petition asking the council to remove the racks began to denounce the removal as an act of treason. But Abner Handy conferred with State leaders on great questions, and the city attorney, who was a candidate for county attorney that fall, did not dare to defend the street commissioner. The council got stubborn, and Colonel Morrison, before whom as justice of the peace the case was to be tried, fearing for the professional safety of his three daughters in the town schools and his four daughters in the county schools, took a trip to his wife's people, and told us he was enlisted there for "ninety days or during the war"; and still Abner Handy looked at the green hills afar.

We are generally accounted by ourselves a fearless newspaper; but here we admitted that the situation required discretion. So we straddled it. We wrote cautious editorials in carefully-balanced sentences demanding that the people keep cool. We advised both sides to realise that only good sense and judgment would straighten out the tangle. We demanded that each side recognise the other's rights and made both sides angry, whereas General Durham, of the Statesman, made his first popular stroke in a dozen years by insisting, in double leads and italics, that the tariff on hides was a divine institution, and that humanity called upon us to hold the Philippines. Charley Hedrick knew better than anyone else in town what a tempest was rising. He might have warned Handy, but he did not; for Handy had reached a point in his career where he considered that a mere county boss was beneath his confidence. More than that, Hedrick had refused to indorse Handy's note at the bank. Handy needed money, and being a shorn lamb, the wind changed in his direction in this wise:

In the midst of the furore that week, Mrs. Worthington gave an evening reception for the Federation and its husbands at her mansion, fed them sumptuously, and, after Mrs. Handy had tapped a bell for silence, Mrs. Worthington rose in her jet and passementerie and announced that our town had come to a crisis in its career; that we must now decide whether we were going to be a beautiful little city or a cow pasture. She said that beauty was as much an essential to life as money and that we would be better off with more beauty and less trade, and that with the court-house square a mudhole the town could never rise to any real consequence. As the men of the town seemed to be moral cowards, she was going to enlist the women in this war, and as the first step in her campaign she proposed to hire the Honourable Abner Handy to assist the city attorney in fighting this case, and as a retainer she would herewith and now hand him her personal check for five hundred dollars. Whereat the women clapped their hands, their husbands winked at one another, and "there was a sound of revelry by night." The check was put on a silver card-tray by Mrs. Worthington and set on a table in the midst of the company waiting for Handy to come forward and take it. After the town had looked at the check, Mrs. Handy seemed to cut his leashes and Abner went after it. He was waiting at the Worthington bank the next morning at nine o'clock to cash it—and all the town saw that also.

Whereupon the town grinned broadly that evening when it read in the Statesman a most laudatory article about "our distinguished fellow-townsman." The article declared that it was "the duty of the hour to send Honourable Abner Handy to the halls of Congress." The Statesman contended that "Judge Handy had been for a lifetime the defender of those grand and glorious principles of freedom and protection and sound money for which the Grand Old Party stood." The General proclaimed that "it shall be not only a duty, but a pleasure, for our citizens to lay aside all petty personal and factional quarrels and rally round the standard of our noble leader in this great contest."

If Handy ever went to the city attorney's office to look after Mrs. Worthington's lawsuit, no one knew it. He smiled wisely when asked how the suit was progressing, and one day John Markley—who during the life of Ezra Worthington, hated him with a ten-horse-power hate and loaded it onto his widow's shoulders and the Worthington bank which she inherited—John Markley called Handy into the back room of the Markley Mortgage Company, and, when Handy passed the cashier's window going out, he cashed a check signed by John Markley for a thousand dollars on which was inscribed "for legal services in assisting the county attorney in the hitching rack case."

Handy had arrived at a point where he feared nothing. He seemed to believe that he lived a charmed life and never would get caught. He bought extra copies of the Statesman, which was booming him for Congress, and sent them over the Congressional District by the thousands. He went to Topeka in his high silk hat and his New York clothes, gave out interviews on the causes of the flurry in the money market, and, desiring further advertisement, gave a banquet for the newspaper men of the capital which cost him a hundred dollars. So he became a great man. At home he assumed a patronising air to the people about Charley Hedrick. And one night in Smith's cigar store, just to be talking, he said that he didn't get so much of Mrs. Worthington's money as people thought, for part of it had to go to "square old Charley Hedrick." Hedrick was John Markley's attorney, and he had taken an active part in helping the county attorney prosecute the street commissioners. Naturally Handy's remark stirred up the town. It was two weeks, however, in getting to Hedrick, and when it came the man turned black and seemed to be swallowing a pint of emotional language before he spoke. And there Abner Handy's doom was sealed; though Hedrick did not make the sentence public.

Now, it is well known in our county that the country people are slow to wrath. They were two months finding out beyond a question of doubt that Abner Handy had accepted Mrs. Worthington's money to act against them, but when they knew this there was no hope for Handy among them. They are a quiet people, and make no noise. For a month, only Charley Hedrick and the grocers and the hardware men, with whom the farmers trade, knew the truth about Handy's standing in the county. Hedrick bided his time. The Handy boom for Congress was rolling over the district, and the Statesman italics were becoming worn, and its exclamation points battered in the service, when one day Handy stalked up to Hedrick's office, imperiously beckoned Hedrick into the private room, and blurted out: