s, for he was stepping like a hen in high oats, with his eyes on
a seat in Congress. Matters of mere local importance did not concern
him. The railroads were for him, and the stars in their courses seemed
to him to be pointing his way to Washington. He knew of the
hitching-rack trouble only when he had to go with Mrs. Handy to the
dinners at the Worthington home given to the councilmen and their wives,
who were lukewarm on the removal proposition.

In the spring before the election of 1902 Mrs. Worthington had a
majority in the council, and one Saturday night the hitching-racks were
taken down by the street commissioner. And within a week the town was on
the verge of civil war, for the farmers of the county rose as one man
and demanded the blood of the offenders. But Abner Handy knew nothing of
the disturbance. The county attorney had the street commissioner and his
men arrested for trespassing upon county property; farmers threatened to
boycott the town. But Abner Handy's ear was attuned to higher things.
Merchants who had signed the petition asking the council to remove the
racks began to denounce the removal as an act of treason. But Abner
Handy conferred with State leaders on great questions, and the city
attorney, who was a candidate for county attorney that fall, did not
dare to defend the street commissioner. The council got stubborn, and
Colonel Morrison, before whom as justice of the peace the case was to be
tried, fearing for the professional safety of his three daughters in the
town schools and his four daughters in the county schools, took a trip
to his wife's people, and told us he was enlisted there for "ninety days
or during the war"; and still Abner Handy looked at the green hills
afar.

We are generally accounted by ourselves a fearless newspaper; but here
we admitted that the situation required discretion. So we straddled it.
We wrote cautious editorials in carefully-balanced sentences demanding
that the people keep cool. We advised both sides to realise that only
good sense and judgment would straighten out the tangle. We demanded
that each side recognise the other's rights and made both sides angry,
whereas General Durham, of the _Statesman_, made his first popular
stroke in a dozen years by insisting, in double leads and italics, that
the tariff on hides was a divine institution, and that humanity called
upon us to hold the Philippines. Charley Hedrick knew better than
anyone else in town what a te