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Updated: May 5, 2025
He worked like a mule, that boy did, jest barely makin' ends meet. He had to quit runnin' with the girls and goin' to parties and everything like that; and I expect it may have been some hard to do; for if they ever was a boy loved to dance and be gay, and up to anything in the line of fun and junketin' round, it was Mel Bickner.
"No, I expect not," rejoined Martin. "Prob'ly you wouldn't; Bickner was Governor along in my early days, and I reckon he ain't hardly more than jest a name to you two. But we kind of thought he was the biggest man this country had ever seen, or was goin' to see, and he was a big man.
He had a laugh I can hear yet made you feel friendly to everybody you saw; feel like stoppin' the next man you met and shakin' hands and havin' a joke with him. "Mel was engaged to Jane Grandis when Governor Bickner died. He had to go and tell her to take somebody else it was the only thing to do. He couldn't give Jane anything but his poverty, and she wasn't used to it.
But when that little boy, that'd always had his board and clothes and education free, saw that he'd jest about talked himself to death, and called for the press notices about his christening to be read to him to soothe his last spasms why, I wasn't overly put in mind of Melville Bickner." Mr. Martin's train left for Plattsville at two in the morning.
And he never give her nor any one else a chanst to be sorry for him. His maw was the only one heard him walk the floor nights, and after he found, out she could hear him he walked in his socks. "Yes, sir! Meet that boy on the street, or go up in his office, you'd think that he was the gayest feller in town. I tell you there wasn't anything pathetic about Mel Bickner! He didn't believe in it.
"Go on with Melville Bickner," said I. "What do you expect," retorted Mr. Martin with a vindictive gleam in his eye, "when you give a man one of these here spiral staircase cigars? Old Peter himself couldn't keep straight along one subject if he tackled a cigar like this. Well, sir, I always thought Mel had a mighty mean time of it.
Below Goodrich this wayward river makes an enormous loop, wherein it goes wandering about for eight miles and accomplishes just one mile's distance. Here it becomes a boundary between the two Bickner villages Welsh Bickner and English Bickner.
"Of course he had enemies, and, of course, year by year, they got to be more of 'em, and they finally downed him for good; and like other public men so fixed, he didn't live long after that. He had a son, Melville, mighty likable young fellow, studyin' law when his paw died. I was livin' in their town then, and I knowed Mel Bickner pretty well; he was consider'ble of a man.
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