support
his family.

"Goin' to start that house of yours?"

"I think not," said Hale.

"Well, I'd like to get a contract for a chicken-coop just to keep my
hand in."

There was more. A two-horse wagon was coming with two cottage-organs
aboard. In the mouth of the slouch-hatted, unshaven driver was a
corn-cob pipe. He pulled in when he saw Hale.

"Hello!" he shouted grinning. Good Heavens, was that uncouth figure the
voluble, buoyant, flashy magnate of the old days? It was.

"Sellin' organs agin," he said briefly.

"And teaching singing-school?"

The dethroned king of finance grinned.

"Sure! What you doin'?"

"Nothing."

"Goin' to stay long?"

"No."

"Well, see you again. So long. Git up!"

Wheel-spokes whirred in the air and he saw a buggy, with the top down,
rattling down another street in a cloud of dust. It was the same buggy
in which he had first seen the black-bearded Senator seven years before.
It was the same horse, too, and the Arab-like face and the bushy black
whiskers, save for streaks of gray, were the same. This was the man who
used to buy watches and pianos by the dozen, who one Xmas gave a present
to every living man, woman and child in the town, and under whose
colossal schemes the pillars of the church throughout the State stood as
supports. That far away the eagle-nosed face looked haggard, haunted and
all but spent, and even now he struck Hale as being driven downward like
a madman by the same relentless energy that once had driven him upward.
It was the same story everywhere. Nearly everybody who could get away
was gone. Some of these were young enough to profit by the lesson and
take surer root elsewhere--others were too old for transplanting, and of
them would be heard no more. Others stayed for the reason that getting
away was impossible. These were living, visible tragedies--still
hopeful, pathetically unaware of the leading parts they were playing,
and still weakly waiting for a better day or sinking, as by gravity,
back to the old trades they had practised before the boom. A few sturdy
souls, the fittest, survived--undismayed. Logan was there--lawyer for
the railroad and the coal-company. MacFarlan was a judge, and two or
three others, too, had come through unscathed in spirit and undaunted
in resolution--but gone were the young Bluegrass Kentuckians, the young
Tide-water Virginians, the New England school-teachers, the bankers,
real-estate agents, engineers; gone the gamb