“Tried to get you at your home. Mrs. Slant said you were still down here. So I hopped in the car.”
Coley didn’t say anything. Hank’s diffidence was real; so was the determination underneath. The best thing was to let Hank go about it in his own way. The editor felt sad. His instincts—and every syllable of his logic—were on the other man’s side.
“Of course,” Hank went on, after a sip of smoke, “I know Minerva Sloan was responsible for your policy change.”
“Yeah.”
“But it’s doing us bad harm. Real bad.” Hank mused a while, got up and lumbered across the room to the big map on the west wall. It was a street map of the two cities, their suburbs and the surrounding villages; there was a duplicate at CD headquarters. Hank used his pipestem for a pointer. “My district, Coley, is here—from West Broad on the north to Windmere Parkway. And from Bigelow to Chase Drive. Takes in a lot of territory—about four square miles, give you a few acres.” He smiled again. “It isn’t so full of folks as you’d think, on account of Crystal Lake and Hobart Park—about eleven thousand people is all. A little over three thousand homes and buildings. Stores in three small shopping centers. Libraries and schools and churches and hospitals and so on. You know it, about as well as I do.”
“Sure, Hank.”
“Out of my area, we had darn near a thousand volunteers, all told.” His eyes, clear and blue like Nora’s eyes, sparkled a little. “Three quarters of ’em roughly were just plain people, working people, running from masons and carpenters and delicatessen owners to the middle category, folks like us Conners. I wouldn’t say more than a quarter—if that, quite—came from the big places around Crystal Lake or up in the chichi district toward Cold Spring. Just a cross section of ordinary city people, you might say. And I’m tolerably sure that out of the thousand not every man-jack—or woman-jill—would show up set and ready, if my outfit ever got asked to do what it’s here for.
“The point is, Coley, these people are the backbone of not just Green Prairie or the Sister Cities, or a couple of states, but the whole doggoned country. Les Brown may just be a handyman. But if you were cast on a desert island for a few years, you’d be smart to take Les—for company and comforts. Alton Bowers may own ten acres of lawn and landscaped gardens and a big mansion, and he may own a pile of grain elevators, but he’s as close to Christian as Baptists ever get!” Hank, a Presbyterian, let the joke linger for a moment. Then the brightness left his eyes, he came back and sat down. “Called a meeting of the whole gang at the South High yesterday, Coley.” Hank looked at his pipe. “Forty-three people showed up.”
“Good Lord!”
Henry sighed. “We usually turned out around five, six hundred.”