“‘One sorrow check,’ says I.
“‘Sincerely and truly sorry, George,’ he repeats and ‘Two sorrows check,’ I repeats and he goes on: ‘Look here, George, I know father, and until I can get the truth into him, which won’t be for a week or two, I suppose he may try to ruin you!’
“‘Check one interesting ruin,’ says I.
“But he brought down his hand on the new case till I shuddered for the glass, and well, say–what do you think that boy done? He pulls out a roll of money big enough to choke a cow and puts it on the case and says: ‘I sold my launch and drew every dollar I had out of the bank before father got home. Here, take it; you may need it in your business until father calms down.’
“Wasn’t that white! I couldn’t get him to put the roll back and along comes Cap Morton, and when I wouldn’t take it the old man glued on to him, and I’m a goat if Morty didn’t lend it to the Captain, with the understanding I could have it any time inside of six months, and the Captain 308could use it afterward. That’s where the Captain got his money to build his shop.”
It cost Daniel Sands five thousand dollars in hard earned money, not that he earned the money, but it was hard-earned nevertheless, to undo the work of that convention, and nominate and elect Thomas Van Dorn district Judge upon an independent ticket. And even when the work was done, the emptiness of the honor did not convince the Judge that this is not a material world. He hugged the empty honor to his heart and made a vast pretense that it was real.
309CHAPTER XXIX
BEING NOT A CHAPTER BUT AN INTERLUDE
Here and now this story must pause for a moment. It has come far from the sunshine and prairie grass where it started. Tall elm trees have grown from the saplings that were stuck in the sod thirty years before, and they limit the vision. No longer can one see over the town across the roofs of Market Street into the prairie. No longer even can one see from Harvey the painted sky at night that marks South Harvey and the industrial towns of the Wahoo Valley. Harvey is shut in; we all are sometimes by our comforts. The dreams of the pioneers that haloed the heads of those who came to Harvey in those first days–those dreams are gone. Here and there one is trapped in brick or wood or stone or iron; and another glows in a child or walks the weary ways of man as a custom or an institution or as a law that brought only a part of the blessings which it promised.
And the equality of opportunity for which these pioneers crossed the Mississippi and came into the prairie uplands of the West–where is that evanescent spirit? Certainly it touched Daniel Sands’s shoulder and he followed it; it beckoned Dr. Nesbit and he followed it a part of the journey. Surely Kyle Perry saw it for years, and Captain Morton was destined to find it, gorgeous and iridescent. Amos Adams might have had it for the asking, but he sought it only for others. It never came to Dooley and Hogan, and Williams and Bowman and those who went into the Valley. Did it die, one may ask; or did it vanish like a prairie stream under the sand to flow on subterranean and appear again strong, purified and refreshed, a powerful current to carry mankind forward? The world that was in the flux of dreams that day when Harvey began, had hardened to reality thirty years after. Men were going their appointed ways working out in circumstances the equation of their life’s philosophy.