Jane Orange turned and hurried
away toward home, but as she half ran through Main Street clerks and
merchants came out of the stores, and from the assembled crowd a voice
called attention to the fact that the contents of the stolen eggs having
run down the inside of her dress and over her stockings began to make a
stream on the sidewalk. A pack of town dogs excited by the shouts of the
crowd ran at her heels, barking and sniffing at the yellow stream that
dripped from her shoes.
An old man with a long white beard came to Bidwell to live. He had been a
carpet-bag Governor of a southern state in the reconstruction days after
the Civil War and had made money. He bought a house on Turner's Pike close
beside the river and spent his days puttering about in a small garden. In
the evening he came across the bridge into Main Street and went to loaf in
Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked with great frankness and candor of his
life in the South during the terrible time when the country was trying to
emerge from the black gloom of defeat, and brought to the Bidwell men a new
point of view on their old enemies, the "Rebs."
The old man--the name by which he had introduced himself in Bidwell was
that of Judge Horace Hanby--believed in the manliness and honesty of
purpose of the men he had for a time governed and who had fought a long
grim war with the North, with the New Englanders and sons of New Englanders
from the West and Northwest.
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