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I've been hopin' all the time we'd git ahead an' have suthin' beside a livin' here in Polktown. I've been hungry for money! "Like enough if I hadn't been so sharp after it, an' complained so 'cause we didn't git ahead, Lem an' Cross Moore wouldn't never got their heads together an' 'greed ter try rum-selling to make the old Inn pay a profit. "Oh, yes! I see my fault now. Oh, Lord!
"I'm not decided yet; but shall enter into some kind of business that I can follow with a clear conscience." "You'll sell out this stands I suppose. The goodwill is worth three or four hundred dollars." "No, Sandy, I will not!" was the tavern-keeper's positive, half indignant reply. "I'll have nothing more to do with the gain of rum-selling. I have too much of that sin on my conscience already."
There was, to me, a brooding silence in the air; a pause in the life-movement; a folding of the hands, so to speak, because hope had failed from the heart. The residence of Mr. Harrison, who, some two years before, had suddenly awakened to a lively sense of the evil of rum-selling, because his own sons were discovered to be in danger, had been one of the most tasteful in Cedarville.
If we wish to find the highest type of the American Indian we must look for him before he was driven west by the land-seeking pioneer and before he was degraded by the rum-selling French trader. The French claimed all the land watered by the Mississippi River and its tributaries. The French Canadian was a restless, roaming adventurer and he found his vocation in the fur-trade.
The front door of the house was closed on other days; on Sunday it was left open, as an intimation that the saloon could be reached in that way. I thought of this Sunday rum-selling as I noticed the arrangement of the doors. Of course the police understood it. I approached the door opening into the saloon, for I heard the voice of my former tyrant.
"As long as the unknown enemy feels that he can harass us without much risk of being caught red-handed, just so long will he go on with his outrages -unless we give in." "Give in?" asked Mr. Prenter, with a rising inflection in his voice. "Unless we give in," supplied Tom promptly, "by allowing gambling and rum-selling to go on openly in our camp of workmen."
"When honesty kills a party, let it die let its men get out and organize another one. But I tell you, you can't kill it by being honest, Thelismer. The trouble is you're sitting here and building for to-night for to-morrow. I'm a Republican you can't take that name away from me. But the badge doesn't belong on men who are using that name to cover up a rum-selling business."
He said nothing of his dream, nor of that horrible idea of going to the rum-seller's hell, and becoming a devil, filled with the delight of rendering mankind wretched by deluging the land with drunkenness. "What are you going to do then?" asked Sandy. "Why, the first thing is to quit rum-selling." "But what then?"
"Well, the less of that the better for me; it's a thing of very little use in the rum-selling business; it interferes with trade so I can't afford to keep a conscience. If you really want me to go, make me a better offer; say two fifty, and I'll begin to think of it. The trial will be over in a month or six weeks, I suppose, and a spree of that length would be very pleasant."
But away with such memories for the moment. Over the lee side with them into the Sea of the Past, together with the clank of the fetters and the hum of the cat and the merciless laws of the time; sink them all together with the names of the military rum-selling traducers of the good Phillip, and of ill-tempered, passionate sailor Bligh of the Bounty honest, brave, irascible, vindictive; destroyer of his ship's company on that fateful adventure to Tahiti, hero of the most famous boat-voyage the world has ever known; sea-bully and petty "hazer" of hapless Fletcher Christian and his comrades, gallant officer in battle and thanked by Nelson at Copenhagen; conscientious governor of a starveling colony gasping under the hands of unscrupulous military money-makers, William Bligh deserves to be remembered by all men of English blood who are proud of the annals of the most glorious navy in the world.