RGL e-Book Cover 2018©
RGL e-Book Cover 2018©
Collier's, 19 January 1935, with "Against the Mob"
THE sound—scraping and sibilant—came out of the rear room again. Saul Trevick tightened the quoins of the page-four form and lifted his eyes toward young Johnny setting type at the cases. Young Johnny hadn't heard; he was a willing boy, but he didn't understand the mystery that ran below New Hope's placid surface.
"Go home now, Johnny."
"Ain't finished the White House ad yet."
Saul Trevick was remembering that when people crept through the back door of his newspaper shop from Wister's Alley they wanted secrecy. He said—"Never mind."—and waited. A partition separated the front office from this angular, high- ceilinged shop in which gas jets lifted pale blooms; another partition in the back end shut off Saul Trevick's bedroom. Light slid vaguely across the tables and type cases, across the skeleton shape of the Washington hand press.
Rain drove against the skylight with a gusty, intermittent rush. Johnny said—"Good night."—and slid around the open end of the front partition. The trip bell tinkled when he let himself into St. Vrain Street. Saul Trevick shifted his cigar between his teeth; his lips settled, and he prepared to hear something unpleasant. He said: "All right."
He didn't look up from the table immediately, for he was thinking of the secrets of New Hope locked in his head with the detached indifference of a man who had no illusions about people—no faith in their goodness and no anger against their sins. He was forty-five, a dry and untidy and silent, little man in whom ambition long since had died, a spectator aloof from surprise and belief. The continuing quiet lifted his head. There was a girl standing in the opening of the rear partition—standing alertly there, wet haired and faintly disheveled. She trembled visibly, and her round breasts rose and fell to an irregular breathing. Fear darkened her face.
Saul Trevick made a distinct turn toward her. "What are you doing here, Lily?"
Her words ran breathlessly together. "We were walking down the alley, but the rain caught us, so we went into Marshall's empty stable and were sitting there when some men came after us. I ran. I didn't want them to know who I was."
"We?"
The girl watched him, her eyes blacker and blacker. She lifted her chin. "Jeff Huntoon and me. They thought we were bad, I guess. They were fighting Jeff when I left."
"They recognize you?" said Saul Trevick calmly.
"No." Suddenly she whirled around to listen, and turned again, rigid and poised for flight.
Trevick said: "Go out the front way. Your father know you keep company with Jeff Huntoon?"
She came on to the middle of the shop and stood before him, her hands lifted. Her mouth was white, and excitement had changed her prettiness to something stronger than that; it had turned her proud and angry. She was eighteen, Saul Trevick recalled, a motherless girl living with a father whose discipline was alternately severe and neglectful. She was a little wild—he could see that whipping across her face now.
"It wouldn't do any good. Please help Jeff, if you can." She ran instantly across the shop and vanished beyond the front office partition. Men's voices rose at the back end of the building, in Wister's Alley, and the front door's trip bell had only died behind the fleeing Lily when they flung themselves out of the alley into his bedroom and filed around the partition. Hands lying on the make-up table, Saul Trevick recognized each of the party of four. Tom Blaine, who was marshal of New Hope, said: "A girl come in here?"
"What's the trouble, Tom?"
"We saw Jeff Huntoon persuade some girl to step into Marshall's stable. We collared Jeff, but the girl's gone. She came this way."
"All right for people to step out of the rain, isn't it?"
Tom Blaine's glance held no sympathy. "You ain't that innocent. Jeff Huntoon's a chaser with a soft way toward girls. It won't do. Not in New Hope. Did she come in here?"
"No
"I think you're lying."
Saul Trevick stirred his cigar between his teeth. His voice was dead level, enormously unkind. "Don't let me detain you from your pleasant pastime of followin' kids down dark alleys."
The four men showed discomfort. Tom Blaine took it poorly; his voice rode an arrogant note upward. "You wouldn't say that if you had a daughter. Your head's full of too damned many funny ideas."
Saul Trevick murmured: "This seems a strange committee to be enforcing the town's morals. How's the road toward Peterson's ranch these days, Tom?"
Tom Blaine's mouth opened—and closed with force. He stepped on until his face was large and threatening against Saul Trevick. Blood pumped into his cheeks. He had an impulse to violence, but he changed it, and wheeled around. His voice was strange. "Jeff gets a warning this time. Next time he'll be whipped out of New Hope."
THEY were soon gone, leaving Saul Trevick with his hands on the
page-four form, his chin tipped against his chest. He pushed
himself away from the table and circled the walls, turning out
the gas jets; and he stood in the darkness and listened to the
rain beat against the roof. Afterward, he went into the rear room
and struck a match to the kerosene lamp there. He washed his
hands and laid aside his cigar to scrub his face, and put the
cigar between his teeth again. Presently he thought to remove his
coat and stoke up the little sheet-metal stove and draw a chair
near it. He filled a water glass half full of whiskey from a
bottle on the table, drank it at once, and settled deep in the
chair. Light turned the contents of the bottle to heavy amber;
narrow-eyed he stared at it, the smoky, burning color of the
liquid shading all his thoughts. He was remembering Lily, the
desperateness of her voice, the protesting stiffness of her body.
Well, there was wildness in her. But it was the wildness of
youth. Lily was eighteen.
"She'll break her heart," he said to himself. "New Hope will see to that."
He filled his glass again and solemnly considered himself. At forty-five nothing mattered any more except physical comfort. A bottle of whiskey and a cigar—he had reduced his existence to these. There wasn't any protest in him at the cruelties of this world; he had been beaten back to a silent acquiescence. Sitting there with a bowed, faintly gray head, he searched himself for some principle that would stir him to anger, and found none.
IT was the following noon that Shiras Huntoon walked from a rain-
driven St. Vrain Street into the Drover's for a drink. He was a
harness maker, a big and heavy and very straight man with a
Southerner's pride written over him plainly. He took his drink
and was standing a moment at the bar when Billy Rees of the New
York Store came swinging into the saloon, saw him, and walked
over immediately. There wasn't any friendliness on Billy Rees's
face. He said, in the shortest, bluntest way possible: "You
better tie up your boy. If he keeps prowlin' around New Hope's
alleys and back fences, he'll get his hide shot off."
"My boy?" said Huntoon in a dismal, dangerous voice. His back stiffened; the flash of his eyes was there for Billy Rees to see.
"You Southerners," ground out Billy Rees, "call it gallantry. Up here we've got a plainer name for it. If New Hope catches Jeff fooling around the women again, he'll get whipped out of town."
"Very plain," breathed Shiras Huntoon, and drew up his hand and slapped Billy Rees across the mouth. It knocked Rees against the bar. The noise in the saloon dropped away, and there was instantly a circle of still and attentive faces around these two men. Billy Rees hooked his elbows over the bar; he was raging angry, but he didn't make another move toward the cold Huntoon. "My boy is a gentleman. I'd break him in two if he wasn't. Young people need their adventure, and the filth you suggest exists only in your mind. I have remarked before, Rees, that you Northerners have no chivalry. Nothing but suspicion and fear of honest laughter."
He stopped and stared completely around him at the silent listeners. He had no friends here. He was quite alone. Yet he said, in contempt: "Four men, led by Tom Blaine, followed my son and some girl down Wister's Alley last night. I can find no word to quite express the prostituted minds of those four men."
"You damned Rebel!" cried Billy Rees. "Go back to the South. Nobody asked you to come here!"
"As for being a Rebel," said Shiras Huntoon, "I at least fought for my side. Did you? But I understand the war is over, and this is again a country for all of us." Saying that much, he turned from them and strode out of the Drover's. Talk rose with a sudden, sullen quickness behind him.
It continued to rise; it continued to grow more and more angry. Shiras Huntoon, stung out of a discreet silence, had dropped a stone into the spuriously smooth surface of New Hope's life, and now the ripples spread outward from the Drover's, down St. Vrain Street, to the houses beyond. Coming along the street under a steady, slanting rain somewhat later in the afternoon, Saul Trevick saw Tom Blaine in front of the White House Restaurant. There was a group of men standing about him, and Tom Blaine's long jaws were grinding out talk. His arms swung, and his big chest rose and fell. There wasn't, Saul Trevick reflected, much wisdom in the man's head and no humor at all. But Blaine's loose lips and deep lungs were made for windy words, and he knew the things that struck home in his neighbors. Blaine saw him and called across the width of the street with a quick arrogance.
"Come over here, Trevick."
Saul Trevick merely shook his head. He turned in at his door and went back through the front partition to the shop. Young Johnny stood stolidly at the cases, setting type. But there was somebody else here, too. Jeff Huntoon stood in the background behind the Washington hand press. He didn't move. He said: "Thank you, Mister Trevick."
Saul Trevick faintly shook his head at the boy. He went across the shop to his room behind the rear partition. It was three o'clock, with little light coming down through the central skylight. Saul Trevick lit the lamp and turned on Jeff Huntoon, who had followed.
"Not wise for you to come here, Jeff."
"You're a gentleman, Mister Trevick. You didn't say anything."
"Maybe I'm a gentleman, Jeff... and maybe I'm taking the easiest way to keep out of trouble."
"Damn this town!" cried Jeff Huntoon.
"Or pity it," observed Saul Trevick quietly. He was watching the recklessness flame up in Jeff Huntoon. It was what he had seen as well in Lily. They were rash, and they didn't understand the brutal reasoning of New Hope.
"You like that girl, Jeff?"
"What can I do about it?"
Saul Trevick removed the shredded fragment of his cigar and studied it with a patient distaste. He dropped it down the vent hole of the stove and sought his vest for another. He didn't look at Jeff Huntoon; lamplight shone without mercy on the weariness of his face and accented the graying edges of his hair.
"You can fight back... and be hurt for your pains. Or you can lie low and wait for this nonsense to blow over."
"Let them hound me and do nothing about it?" breathed Jeff Huntoon. "Never, Mister Trevick. Never!"
Saul Trevick's arm made a slow gesture. "Perhaps you're right," he said, without emotion. "You'll be hurt if you fight back. At your age maybe it's worth the struggle. At my age it's different. You can't do much about people when they've lost their reason."
Jeff Huntoon turned through the back door, saying nothing more. Wind came in, whipping the lamp flame. Saul Trevick walked back to the shop and found Johnny laying a column of type carefully into the page-one form on the make-up table. He seemed thoroughly blind to all things save his slow, painstaking work. Saul Trevick spoke with a degree of sharpness.
"People come to this shop either to get something in the paper or to keep something out of the paper. But whatever you see or hear in this shop... you haven't seen it, and you haven't heard it. Understand, Johnny?"
"Yes, sir."
Yet Saul Trevick wasn't quite satisfied. "Never betray a confidence. It's the only thing I can teach you. Do you understand, Johnny?"
Johnny said—"Yes, sir."—and looked around at Saul Trevick with a faint show of puzzlement. Saul Trevick's lips clinched the cigar stiffly; he pushed back his hat and picked up a composing stick and began to set type at a fast pace. But only half of his mind was on his job. The other half kept digging into the mystery of New Hope.
HE felt the making storm. It was pretty definite to him. The
Civil War was sixteen years in the past, but some of the war's
resentment and distrust still lingered—like embers buried
in the ashes of an old fire. The few Southerners who had drifted
into New Hope understood this perfectly and had been wise enough
to hold their opinions in silence. It was Shiras Huntoon, goaded
out of discretion, who now fanned the flame to life again.
There was something additional here, Saul Trevick thought, that New Hope didn't realize. Living on the edge of the prairie, swept by summer's dust and winter's wind, isolated from the East and facing a Western wilderness, its people were touched by the wildness and the loneliness of the frontier that surrounded them. They had to be a dogged, hard-fibered sort to absorb the shocks of a raw land. But, tied into monotony and the grinding work of the day, there was in them a deep appetite for relief, and relief came to them only in vivid, violent, emotional outbursts: the election campaign, the murder trial, or the revival meeting that gave them their only relaxation from the discipline of the frontier. It was this deep and intense capacity for strong feeling Shiras Huntoon had released.
Saul Trevick heard the trip bell ring, but he went on setting type, his thoughts revolving around and around these people until he heard Tom Blaine speaking with an arbitrary command. He turned then and saw that a committee waited on him, the flickering gaslights sliding across the dark and disturbed set of each man's cheeks. He said mildly—"How do, gentlemen?"—and identified them all.
Tom Blaine could not keep his words pitched low. They rose and sailed across the shop, argumentative, ill-chosen, faintly ranting. "You're going to tell us who the girl was, Saul. We're satisfied she came in here last night."
Saul Trevick bowed his head a moment and ran his free fingers carefully over the type standing in his stick. The report of rain and wind flailed against the deep silence here. When he answered, it was with a detached wonder. "Why would you want to drag a girl's name down the mud of St. Vrain Street?"
Tom Blaine said brusquely: "So we can put a charge against Jeff Huntoon. She went willingly into Marshall's stable with him. What are you so considerate about? Who was the girl?"
"I don't know."
Tom Blaine lifted his long chin and shot the question at Johnny. "Who was it, Johnny?"
But young Johnny merely spread his arms. "I never saw nothin'."
Saul Trevick watched the men standing so darkly against him, and he saw something in their eyes. He knew what they thought then. Nor did he have to guess, for Tom Blaine's windy, bitter voice slapped at him.
"Do you propose to set yourself with the Southerners of this town? If you do, let's hear you say so. New Hope ain't big enough for any group of nigger-lovin' Copperheads whose sons chase around with decent girls. And it ain't big enough for a man like you, Trevick, if you think to support those people." He stopped, and afterward drove his threat home distinctly. "How'd you like to have somebody come in here and smash your shop?"
Trevick's head nodded quietly as though in answer to one of his own thoughts. He said very softly: "Let me remind you men of something you've forgotten. Other people have come into my back door before she did, bearing tales. If I were to talk, I wouldn't stop at that girl's name. I can go back eight years, and I can remember a good deal about a great many of you. You want her name now?"
Tom Blaine's cheeks showed change. Thoughtfully turning his glance along that row of men, Trevick saw some of them suddenly drop their glances away. "Money and politics and liquor and women," he murmured. "Where do you fellows get this sudden burst of moral purity? I recall...."
"Shut up!" said Blaine. He turned on the others and said: "Let's get out of here." But at the partition doorway there was a discussion amongst them, and presently Blaine spoke again. "Trevick, you keep all this stuff out of your paper. Whatever happens tonight... don't print it!"
Then they were gone, slamming the front door violently behind.
Saul Trevick said to Johnny: "Get your supper and hurry back." He stood a moment after Johnny was gone, looking around his shop with the thoughtful eyes of a stranger and shook his head. He said—"it is hard to understand."—and went to the rear room. He lighted the lamp and poured himself a long drink. The rain made his bones ache, but the whiskey killed that. And the whiskey cleared his mind and turned all his thoughts logical. Somewhere an ancient ability to feel anger stirred from its long sleep. I am ruined, he told himself, and walked slowly through the shop and let himself into St. Vrain Street.
THE moods of this town were like the moods of a woman. He
understood them—and felt them; and before he had quite
crossed St. Vrain to the White House Restaurant, he knew the
night would be bad. There was that feeling of ugliness in the
wind. He ate his steak and walked to the counter. Herb Marshall,
who ran the White House, reached back to a shelf and brought out
a box of cigars; it was a pattern that ran back eight years
without variation. Saul Trevick filled a pocket with them, and
paid his bill. There was something here that lifted his attention
to Herb, who spoke evenly.
"Saul, take my ad out of your paper."
Saul Trevick stared at him, but Herb Marshall's feelings retreated and died behind the hazel screen of his eyes. Trevick's lips tightened about his cigar. "All right," he said, and went into the street again. The rain, driven by a higher wind, laid a silver net across the dark; and there was a crowd of New Hope's young men standing with some sort of visible purpose in front of Saul Trevick's shop. They saw him coming, but they didn't move, and he had to walk around them, through the forming mud at the foot of the sidewalk. There was one glaring word scrawled in blue chalk on his door, an epithet of the war that hadn't yet lost its stinging force: Copperhead. Saul Trevick's lips formed the word faintly, and he stood with his back to the group, knowing they watched him with an eagerness for trouble. But he put his hand to the doorknob and went inside, without looking around.
Johnny stood by the Washington hand press, wetting down paper; this was printing night, and all the forms were locked up. Henry Gray's youngster, Ted, had come in to his weekly chore of feeding the ink roller. Johnny looked about at Saul Trevick, stolidly troubled.
"They're going to wreck Shiras Huntoon's harness shop tonight."
"Mob logic," grunted Saul Trevick. He watched Johnny's big frame fall into the steady rhythm of presswork and afterward went back to the rear room and poured himself another drink and remained with his hand touching the table, his face bowed over a bottle almost empty. Most of his courage and most of his comfort, he reflected, had come out of bottles like that. They were his companions across a good many years, bringing to him a peace and a release from memory, and to him also an occasional brief glimpse of human magnanimity he had never seen on St. Vrain Street.
He dropped into the chair. Some day, he told himself, men will not he afraid of generosity. But not in my time. The law of this world now is cruelty. People are blind What good is the integrity of a man's conscience if New Hope stones him for it? He was angrier than he remembered being in years; out of the long, gray emptiness of his life came a burst of rebellion that was strange to him. The hand press set up a steady clicking beyond the partition—and somebody was speaking there. But he paid no attention until a voice said: "Saul."
Ed McAleer stood before him, a big and solid man who understood people and still could laugh. McAleer smiled a little and for a while studied the disheveled, graying man sprawled in the chair. He spoke with slow emphasis.
"You're a queer duck, Saul. Never did give anybody a chance to know you. Someday, when the town's calmed down, it will like you better for not speakin' the girl's name. Meanwhile, keep your shirt on. There'll be hell poppin' tonight, or I don't know New Hope. Shiras Huntoon said the wrong thing. The truth, maybe... but still the wrong thing. And Tom Blaine is politician enough to make the matter worse, to his own advantage. He'll ride into the legislature on foolishness like this."
Saul Trevick said: "Jeff Huntoon and his girl were walkin' in the rain, and went into Marshall's for shelter, a couple of youngsters dreamin' things that none of us feel more than once. Tom Blame... and that pack out on the street... they're blind."
Ed McAleer said: "There's a streak of pride in you, Saul. Don't make an issue out of this. Whatever happens, keep it out of your paper. I tell you this for your own comfort."
THROUGH the steady tempo of the rain along the building walls
emerged the staccato break of outside sounds. The press stopped
its methodical clicking. Ed McAleer turned from the back room,
his feet striking solidly through the shop. Glass smashed
somewhere; the voices of men lifted and fell. Johnny came rapidly
to the rear room.
"Breakin' into Shiras Huntoon's shop. They're throwin' his goods in the mud."
"Mob logic," said Saul Trevick. Irony grated in his throat, but Johnny didn't understand. He showed his wonder and went back to the press. Saul Trevick pushed himself out of his chair; he started toward the shop—and stopped. The alley door burst open, and the wind sucked out the lamplight instantly. Then the door closed, and he heard heavy breathing across the darkness. He said: "Who is it?"
"Lily!"
He reached the table and lighted the lamp again. She had her back to the door, her body pressed against it. Her face was distinctly white, and her breasts swelled with her violent breathing. Water dripped down her hatless head. Saul Trevick dropped his glance, afraid of the blackness of her eyes.
"It isn't only the harness shop. They're going after Jeff."
He said irritably: "Why do you come here?"
Her body slackened; her voice lost all its tone. "Where else could I go?"
He said—"Wait."—and went through the shop to the front office. Heat misted the window; he scrubbed off the film and put his forehead against the pane, seeing the crowd stir reluctantly away from the gutted harness shop. There was a heap of Huntoon's stuff lying in the middle of the street. He went back to Lily. She couldn't keep hope out of her eyes when she looked at him. How long had it been, he asked himself, since any human being had thought to come to him for support?
"Where's your father?"
"I haven't seen him in the house since dinner time."
"Wait," he said again. "Wait right here." He went out into Wister's Alley and sloshed through the soft mud. Two buildings farther on he ducked into the stable. A roustabout wheeled slowly beneath a suspended lantern and showed a dim, inquiring face.
Trevick said: "Doc Barnes has got to make a call. Get his sorrels hitched to a rig soon as you can." He didn't wait for an answer. He retracted, following the alley to Cottonwood Street, crossed over Cottonwood, and vanished in the thicker shadows of the residential section. He knew what he would find—and found it. Stragglers cut by him, through the rain, running ahead. A crowd had formed in front of Shiras Huntoon's house; somebody was breaking down the fence. Somebody was shouting: "Send Jeff out here!" They hadn't gone up to the porch, Saul Trevick saw; they hung back, afraid of something inside Shiras Huntoon's door. But the door opened, and the men quit yelling. Silence dropped, and there was only the slash of the rain—that and Shiras Huntoon's repressed words as he faced them.
"My son is not here."
IT was a courage Saul Trevick suddenly admired; it was a quick
flash of light in a dismal world. He turned from the forming
edges of the crowd and cut back into Wister's Alley. Doc Barnes's
team waited in the stable runway; the roustabout had disappeared.
He seized the near sorrel's bridle and towed the team into the
alley, as far as his own rear door. He opened the door
swiftly—and stepped in. Jeff Huntoon stood opposite him
with a revolver's cold, round muzzle lifted.
Anger gripped Trevick. "If you lose your head, I shall have nothing to do with you. Put that gun on the table, or New Hope will hang you for a killing."
The gun fell away. Jeff Huntoon's eyes were hard; they were old. He wasn't a youngster any more. He said, between tight lips: "What would you do, Mister Trevick?"
"You are through in New Hope. It's hard for young people to run when the time comes for running." He was trembling, and he felt his bones ache. "But go and find some place in the world where you can hold your conscience in peace."
"Yes," murmured Lily.
Saul Trevick emptied the last of the bottle's liquor into a glass and drank it. He put his back to them, but the silence went on. When he turned again, they were looking at each other in a way that struck him hard. Jeff Huntoon's voice ran low and humble: "You're wet, Lily... you're soaked." But she was smiling, and Jeff Huntoon crossed over, took hold of her, and kissed her. Once, Saul Trevick considered, he had known what this was. It was a memory now; maybe it was only an illusion.
He said: "There's a buggy outside. It's twenty miles to Amity, and it's raining, and it's disagreeable, but what is that to you?"
The girl came over to Saul and grabbed his arm. She wasn't far from tears, but a moment later she went out the back door with Jeff Huntoon. He heard them drive away.
"Courage," he murmured, "comes easier to the young."
YET there was something they had left behind in the room that
shamed him. He felt it and turned into the shop where young
Johnny doggedly worked at the hand press. He stood in the middle
of the shop, watching Johnny's shoulders lift and fall and then
went on to the front office and stared through the window, at
Shiras Huntoon's goods piled in the middle of muddy St. Vrain.
Men stood around it; men moved restlessly along the walk. He
opened his door and looked at the Copperhead scrawled on the
panel, and closed the door abruptly. Returning to the shop, his
jaws tightened around the cigar.
He moved to a corner rack and found a cut of an American flag. His face changed a little then; a faint light broke through. He laid the cut inside an empty form on the make-up table. "Johnny," he said, "keep your conscience... it's all you've got." He lifted a stick, and for a moment remained still before the cases, his eyes half closed, bringing his bitter thoughts into line. The rain had freshened to a vigorous rush against the skylight, and the gas flames jumped a little from the currents prowling this draughty building. He pushed back his hat and began to set type.
HALF an hour later he laid the type from his stick into the form,
just below the American flag. He boxed in flag and story with
column rules, put his paper's masthead at the top, slugged the
surrounding white space with furniture, and locked it. He inked
the type and got a sheet of paper and pulled a proof, he reversed
the paper, staring at the flag and the story standing below it.
When he read it, his lips moved:
Late tonight, moved by a spirit of insanity such as sometimes comes to this town, a mob of irresponsible men smashed into Shiras Huntoon's saddle shop, destroyed what they could, and threw what they could not destroy into St. Vrain Street, where it lies now as a monument to fools. All this was the result of Shiras Huntoon's speaking a few words of truth that New Hope didn't like to hear, in behalf of his son, Jeff, who had committed the unpardonable crime, in New Hope's estimation, of courting a girl down Wister's Alley. The flag at the top of this entry is supposed to cover all those who live under it. The war is sixteen years dead, and there is room for all of us in this great land. Yet New Hope seems to have forgotten. And forgotten, too, is that admonition of the Master, who said: "Let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone."
—Saul Trevick.
HE turned then to Johnny who worked on at the press and to Ted,
the roller boy. He said: "Go on home."
Johnny stopped working. He said: "What?"
"Go on home."
"But..."
"Go home," shouted Trevick. "Good God... get out of here!"
Johnny didn't understand. But he reached for his coat and looked at Ted and winked obviously. They went out of the shop together. Saul Trevick remained at the make-up table until he heard the trip bell jingle. Afterward, he took the printed sheet into the office, found a paste-pot, and opened the front door. A man sloshing through the rain looked at him and went on; across the street by the White House a small crowd stood and seemed to be waiting. Trevick pasted the edges of the sheet and stuck it on his door, covering the scrawled Copperhead. Back in the shop he stared around him at the walls that had been his shelter for eight years and suddenly found them strange. His cigar was bad; he threw it away, got another, and lighted a match. His hands, he noticed, were not quite steady. Afterward he placed himself behind the make-up table, with his hands resting on it, his graying head pointed toward the front partition. He was standing like that when the crowd smashed through the front door and came violently around the partition into the shop.
THEY saw him standing there, small and without significance. Yet,
for a moment, the leading man paused, not quite certain, and then
more men came on and pushed through, and at once all of them
spread through the shop and began to wreck it. He didn't stir.
They lifted his cases and capsized the loose type on the floor
and broke the cases beneath their feet; they ripped his furniture
racks off the walls, tipped over his tables, and piles of paper.
Four men upset the Washington hand press. They went to the rear
room, and he heard his own possessions being scattered and rent.
They came back to where he stood; one man pulled away the table
by which he supported himself and threw it on its side. He saw
the flash of their eyes and their heavy breathing. He looked
around him and found nothing escaped from the ruin. They had said
nothing; and they left the shop without saying anything.
But there was one man walking in from the alley. Saul Trevick turned, past curiosity, and found Tom Blaine there.
Blaine said: "It is a lesson you needed long ago. You'll never put together another paper in New Hope."
"No," said Saul Trevick, very slowly, "I never will. But I said what I had to say. That's the important thing, Tom." He looked thoughtfully at Blaine. "Been home yet tonight?"
Blaine studied him a moment. He said: "Why?" There wasn't any answer and then a change broke across his face. He said rapidly again: "Why?"
"Jeff Huntoon's gone from New Hope, taking the girl with him. The girl was your daughter, Lily."
HE wasn't a fighting man. He had no defense to make against the
sudden lunge Tom Blaine made at him. He stood still and took a
solid blow across the face; it knocked him down into the capsized
make-up table. One of its legs scraped across his side. Tom
Blaine stood over him a moment, cursing him wildly. Then Blaine
ran out of the place.
Saul Trevick got up and limped to the back room. The rear door was open, and most of his stuff had been pitched into the alley. He put his hands in his pockets and looked around him and pulled them out and reached down to recover the whiskey bottle. It was empty. He pitched it into the alley and went out there and scurried around the mud till he found his overcoat. He put it on and came back to the room. There was a small, cedarwood box thrown in a corner; he got this and carried it into the shop and wrapped it carefully in a piece of print paper. Going out the rear door again, into the alley's darkness, he held the box under his arm carefully. The few important relics of his life were in that box, the only thing he cared to rescue from the obscure vengeance of New Hope.
At the end of Wister's Alley, he swung into Custer Street and passed out of the town. A road ran due south to Amity, through the gusty, liquid blackness of the night. He stopped here, turning to look at the few, glimmering lights of New Hope. There wasn't any regret in him; there wasn't any bitterness in him. He said, in a way that was like elation: "Apparently I've got some deadline even New Hope can't force me beyond." It was personal triumph. "My conscience is clear," he murmured, lifted his coat collar, and swung into the muddy road, bound for Amity and the world beyond Amity, without a care.