"Seven battles were won in seven days once. All my life I have been
fighting causes, Carroll, and principles. I have been working with
laws against law-breakers. I have never yet fought a man. It was not
poor old Meakim, the individual, I prosecuted, but the corrupt
politician. Now, here I have been thrown with men and women on as
equal terms as a crew of sailors cast away upon a desert island. We
were each a law unto himself. And I have been brought face to face,
and for the first time in my life, not with principles of conduct, not
with causes, and not with laws, but with my fellow men."
THE BOY ORATOR OF ZEPATA CITY
The day was cruelly hot, with unwarranted gusts of wind which swept
the red dust in fierce eddies in at one end of Main Street and out at
the other, and waltzed fantastically across the prairie. When they had
passed, human beings opened their eyes again to blink hopelessly at
the white sun, and swore or gasped, as their nature moved them. There
were very few human beings in the streets, either in Houston Avenue,
where there were dwelling-houses, or in the business quarter on Main
Street. They were all at the new court-house, and every one possessed
of proper civic pride was either in the packed court-room itself, or
standing on the high steps outside, or pacing the long, freshly
calcimined corridors, where there was shade and less dust. It was an
eventful day in the history of Zepata City. The court-house had been
long in coming, the appropriation had been denied again and again; but
at last it stood a proud and hideous fact, like a gray prison,
towering above the bare, undecorated brick stores and the frame houses
on the prairie around it, new, raw, and cheap, from the tin statue on
the dome to the stucco round its base already cracking with the sun.
Pages:
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73