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This, rushing forthwith to do, he did; and, in the elation of the moment, seven or eight besides. She turned beamingly to Harkless. "What a family it is!" she laughed. "Just one big, jolly family. I didn't know people could be like this until I came to Plattville." "That is the word for it," he answered, resting his hand on the casement beside her.
The old man had a daughter. When she came to Plattville, he told her what the editor of the "Herald" had done for him. The journalist kept steadily at his work; and, as time went on, the bitterness his predecessor's swindle had left him passed away. But his loneliness and a sense of defeat grew and deepened.
He had been here before, and even taken a dinner once upon a time, when his club came over to play the Plattville boys. A small-sized crowd stood around the door of the bar room. Frank could see that there seemed to be some signs of excitement, though he did not suspect that it could have anything to do with him.
Bence could have been a good deal longer in saying what he had to say, and a thousand times more oratorical. Nevertheless, there was not a man or woman present who did not declare that it was the greatest speech ever heard in Plattville; and they really thought so to such lengths are loyalty and friendship sometimes carried in Carlow and Amo and Gaines.
Her verses beginning, "O, my native city, bride of Hibbard's winding stream," Hibbard's Creek runs west of Plattville, except in time of drought "When thy myriad lights are shining, and thy faces, like a dream, Go flitting down thy sidewalks when their daily toil is done," were pronounced, at the time of their publication, the best poem that had ever appeared in the "Herald."
Horner came out presently, and whispered a long, broad, profound curse upon the men of the Cross-Roads, and Meredith's gratitude to him was keen. Barrett went away, soon after, leaving the cab for the gentlemen from Plattville. Meredith had a strange, unreasonable desire to kick Barrett, possibly for his sergeant's sake.
They would quarrel and shoot each other to pieces long before they got here." "But they worked in a company once." "Never for seven miles. Four miles was their radius. Five would see them all dead." She struck the bench again. "Oh, you laugh at me! You make a joke of your own life and death, and laugh at everything! Have five years of Plattville taught you to do that?"
He thought of the whimsical fate that had taken her to Plattville, of the reason for her going, and the old thought came to him that the world is, after all, so very small. He looked up at the twinkling stars; they were reassuring and kind.
Harkless often vowed to himself he would watch no more sunsets in Plattville; he realized that their loveliness lent a too unhappy tone to the imaginings and introspections upon which he was thrown by the loneliness of the environment, and he considered that he had too much time in which to think about himself.
If he never saw her again, and the vision only lasted the time it takes a lady to cross the sidewalk from a shop door to a carriage, he was always a little in love with her, because she bore about her, somewhere, as did every pretty girl he ever saw, a suggestion of the far-away divinity. One does not pass lovely strangers in the streets of Plattville.
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