The Gentleman from Indiana - Page 7/212

Old Fisbee had come (from nobody knew where) to Plattville to teach, and

had been principal of the High School for ten years, instructing his

pupils after a peculiar fashion of his own, neglecting the ordinary

courses of High School instruction to lecture on archaeology to the

dumfounded scholars; growing year by year more forgetful and absent, lost

in his few books and his own reflections, until, though undeniably a

scholar, he had been discharged for incompetency. He was old; he had no

money and no way to make money; he could find nothing to do. The blow had

seemed to daze him for a time; then he began to drop in at the hotel bar,

where Wilkerson, the professional drunkard, favored him with his society.

The old man understood; he knew it was the beginning of the end. He sold

his books in order to continue his credit at the Palace bar, and once or

twice, unable to proceed to his own dwelling, spent the night in a lumber

yard, piloted thither by the hardier veteran, Wilkerson.

The morning after the editor took him home, Fisbee appeared at the

"Herald" office in a new hat and a decent suit of black. He had received

his salary in advance, his books had been repurchased, and he had become

the reportorial staff of the "Carlow County Herald"; also, he was to write

various treatises for the paper. For the first few evenings, when he

started home from the office, his chief walked with him, chatting

heartily, until they had passed the Palace bar. But Fisbee's redemption

was complete.

The old man had a daughter. When she came to Plattville, he told her what

the editor of the "Herald" had done for him.

The journalist kept steadily at his work; and, as time went on, the

bitterness his predecessor's swindle had left him passed away. But his

loneliness and a sense of defeat grew and deepened. When the vistas of the

world had opened to his first youth, he had not thought to spend his life

in such a place as Plattville; but he found himself doing it, and it was

no great happiness to him that the congressional representative of the

district, the gentleman whom the "Herald's" opposition to McCune had sent

to Washington, came to depend on his influence for renomination; nor did

the realization that the editor of the "Carlow County Herald" had come to

be McCune's successor as political dictator produce a perceptibly

enlivening effect on the young man. The years drifted very slowly, and to

him it seemed they went by while he stood far aside and could not even see

them move. He did not consider the life he led an exciting one; but the

other citizens of Carlow did when he undertook a war against the "White

Caps." The natives were much more afraid of the "White Caps" than he was;

they knew more about them and understood them better than he did.