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At the very nethermost point of his downward swoop Solon Denney was raised to a height so dizzy that even the erstwhile sceptic spirit of Westley Keyts abased itself before him, frankly conceding that diplomacy's innocent and mush-like surface might conceal springs of a terrible potency.
That was a bitter recess, even though I learned her wonderful name and the enchanted state "back East" from which she had come. A still more bitter experience awaited me when we were again in the schoolroom. Miss Berham, fastening a steely gaze upon Solon Denney, launched heaven upon him from tightly drawn lips, without in the least meaning to do so.
And still again, after another pause, "Well, well, well!" This was thought to be shifty and evasive certainly not so outspoken as the town had a right to expect. Solon Denney, though in his heart true to Shakspere, affected to be gleeful. A paragraph, mysterious to many, including Miss Caroline, appeared in the ensuing Argus:
Sometimes I think that a certain new respect for me grew within her as the days tried the metal of my silence a respect, but nothing more. Her appreciation of my face was too palpably without those reservations that so often cry louder than words. So we sealed our secret, she and I, in an unspoken pledge, and not even Solon Denney, so keen of scent for rivals, ever divined it.
"By thinking, for example, you could elevate your sheet by eliminating certain misapplied colloquialisms. Here I read: 'The rain last week left the streets in a frightful state. The mud simply won't jell." Shame mantled the brow of Solon Denney. "In short," concluded Mrs. Potts, "I regret to say that your paper is not yet one that I could wish to put into the hands of my little Roscoe."
A hundred dollars it was. Purse and letters were turned over to Solon Denney to deliver to Potts. The Argus came out with its promised eulogy, a thing so fulsome that any human being but J. Rodney Potts would have sickened to read it of himself. But our little town was elated. One could observe that last day a subdued but confident gayety along its streets as citizens greeted one another.
But it was in this affair that Solon Denney won his title of "Boss of Little Arcady," a title first rendered unto him somewhat in derision, I regret to say, by a number of our leading citizens, who sought, as it were, to make sport of him.
Then Potts spoke openly of the expenses of travel. Solon, royally promising a purse of gold to take him on his way, clenched the winning of a neat and bloodless victory. No one has ever denied that Denney must have employed a faultless, an incomparable tact, to bring J. Rodney Potts to this agreement.
Naturally they were directed against Solon Denney. By that time Westley Keyts was greeting Solon morosely, though without open cavil; but Asa Bundy no longer hesitated to speak out. He quoted Scripture to Solon about the house that was swept and garnished, and the seven other wicked spirits that entered it, making its last state worse than its first.
The world could still be peopled; even Solon Denney might survive a little time, for another picture in the same geography now reproduced itself in my inflamed mind the picture of a South Sea island, a sandy beach with a few indolent natives lolling, negligent of tasks, in the shade of cocoanut palms. Here, on the outer reef, I wrecked an excellent steamship.
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