At about the same hour, four times a week--Monday, Wednesday, Friday,
and Saturday--Sheridan stopped at this shop to be shaved by the head
barber. The barbers were negroes, he was their great man, and it was
their habit to give him a "reception," his entrance being always the
signal for a flurry of jocular hospitality, followed by general excesses
of briskness and gaiety. But it was not so this evening.

The shop was crowded. Copies of the "Extra" were being read by men
waiting, and by men in the latter stages of treatment. "Extras" lay upon
vacant seats and showed from the pockets of hanging coats.

There was a loud chatter between the practitioners and their recumbent
patients, a vocal charivari which stopped abruptly as Sheridan opened
the door. His name seemed to fizz in the air like the last sputtering
of a firework; the barbers stopped shaving and clipping; lathered men
turned their prostrate heads to stare, and there was a moment of amazing
silence in the shop.

The head barber, nearest the door, stood like a barber in a tableau. His
left hand held stretched between thumb and forefinger an elastic section
of his helpless customer's cheek, while his right hand hung poised above
it, the razor motionless. And then, roused from trance by the door's
closing, he accepted the fact of Sheridan's presence. The barber
remembered that there are no circumstances in life--or just after
it--under which a man does not need to be shaved.

He stepped forward, profoundly grave. "I be through with this man in the
chair one minute, Mist' Sheridan," he said, in a hushed tone. "Yessuh."
And of a solemn negro youth who stood by, gazing stupidly, "You goin'
RESIGN?" he demanded in a fierce undertone. "You goin' take Mist'
Sheridan's coat?" He sent an angry look round the shop, and the barbers,
taking his meaning, averted their eyes and fell to work, the murmur of
subdued conversation buzzing from chair to chair.

"You sit down ONE minute, Mist' Sheridan," said the head barber, gently.
"I fix nice chair fo' you to wait in."

"Never mind," said Sheridan. "Go on get through with your man."

"Yessuh." And he went quickly back to his chair on tiptoe, followed by
Sheridan's puzzled gaze.

Something had gone wrong in the shop, evidently. Sheridan did not know
what to make of it. Ordinarily he would have shouted a hilarious demand
for the meaning of the mystery, but an inexplicable silence had been
imposed upon him by the hush that fell