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You focus on him and say, 'What a beastly shame! and you entirely overlook the other fifty-odd people in the car who are quietly minding their own business." Blount's smile was for the man rather than for the theory. "You are an implacable optimist, Dick, and you always have been," he returned.
I reckon Billy's been 'lowin' that so long as he couldn't be my fust, owin' to delays an' happenin's, he'd make out to be my las'. I been kinder expectin' that Billy'd come along for fifty-odd years an' every time I'd git a chance to git ma'id I'd kinder put it off, thinkin' he mought turn up, an' every time I'd bury a husband I'd say to myself, 'Now maybe this time Billy'll be comin' along. I been namin' my chilluns arfter him off an' on.
Being wise politicians, the leaders of the law-and-order party kept to themselves the information as to John Ringo's whereabouts. That evening they called a meeting of their followers, and a second posse set forth through the darkness for Charleston. There were some fifty-odd of them, well armed and enthusiastic. Their purpose was to bring the outlaw to the court-house the next morning.
The niggers came off to us in their canoes by hundreds, but they only laughed when we showed them beads and calico and hatchets and talked of the delights of plantation work in Samoa. "On the fourth day there came a change. Fifty-odd boys signed on and were billeted in the main-hold, with the freedom of the deck, of course.
There were "Grandmother Tyler," a sweet-faced old woman, with silvery hair smoothed away under a red silk kerchief folded cornerwise and tied under her chin; and her son, "Father Tyler," with his fifty-odd years showing themselves in his grizzled hair and beard; and "Mother Tyler," a brisk stout woman, with great strength of character in her strong features, black eyes, and straight black hair.
These gentlemen, under the demands of the fast mail-trains, will ere long swell from a regiment into a brigade, and so into a division, till poets and painters be called on to drop the theme of "waiting for the mail." The greater portion of the fifty-odd thousand employés of the department do not give it their whole time, many of the country postmasters being engaged in other business.
They came and went, picked up and used what they could, and that was all life held for them. They were without wage, without rights, even to the possession of their own bodies; so by necessity they took what they could. That was only fifty-odd years ago.
I was humiliated and ashamed. I, Horace Johnson, a man of dignity and reputation, even in a small way, a successful after-dinner speaker, numbering fifty-odd years of logical living to my credit, had been running half-maddened toward a mythical danger from which I had been afraid to run away! I sat down and mopped my face with my pocket handkerchief.