Sally of Missouri | Page 9

the first
thing that he proposed for the city of his adoption was the Canaan Short
Line, and, coming at the opportune moment, the consummation of that
proposition placed Madeira at the head of Canaan's municipal life for
the rest of his days. In a very short time after he came to Canaan,
Canaan not only had a railroad, but her own railroad. Reassured, bland,
she caught step with progress, by and by saw that she was progress, and
settled back into her old superiority. Her trade prospered anew, the
cotton came to her depot, she got accustomed to the noise of her two
trains daily, and had lived through many contented years when the
twentieth of September of 1899 opened up like a rose, fair,
fragrance-laden, warm, around her.
Out on the face of the day there was nothing to suggest change or crisis,
nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be hopeful for, a day like yesterday,
like to-morrow, a golden link in a golden monotony. At Court House
Square, a few farm-teams, strapping mules and big Studebakers, stood
at the hitching rail. A few people came and went up and down and
across the Square. Occasionally a mean-natured man said "huh-y!" to a
cow or "soo-y!" to a hog in the middle of Main Street. Some coatless
clerks, with great elbow-deep sleeve protectors on their arms and large
lumps of cravats at their throats, lounged in store doors. The most
conspicuous, as the most institutional, feature of the landscape was the
group idling on boxes in front of the old Grange store--just as they had
idled on boxes before the war. They were the same men, it was the
same store, and it was not inconceivable that they were the same boxes.
As the men idled they spat, somewhat to the menace of the passers-by,
though in defence of this avocation it may be argued that any truly
agile person, by watching carefully and seizing opportunity
unhesitatingly, could get by undefiled. Sometimes a vehicle rolled into
the street toward the Square, and when this happened it was amusement
to the men to say whose vehicle without looking up--jack-knives,
watch-fobs, and other valuables occasionally changing hands on an
erring guess between the slow, solemn trot of Mr. Azariah's Pringle's
Bess and the duck-like waddling of Mrs. Molly Jenkins' Tom, or
between the swinging canter of Miss Sally Madeira's Kentucky blacks
and the running walk of the small-hoofed Texas ponies from We-all

Prairie. Once a great waggon, piled high with cotton, creaked by; once
a burnt-skinned boy, hard as a nut, shrieking with an irrepressible sense
of being alive, loped past on a mustang. Once a small, old man, in
mean clothes and with a fine bearing, crossed the Square, cracking his
whip nervously, his spur clicking on his boot as he walked. Once a
large florid man and a tall girl came down the street and entered the
door of a two-story brick building next the Grange. The man had an
expansive, blustering way. The girl looked as though she were
accustomed to admire the man and to badger him; her face was turned
up to his adoringly, while her fun-hunting eyes, just sheathed under her
lids, gleamed gaily. The building had a plate-glass window across the
front of it, and on the window, in gold letters bordered in black, two
legends were flung to the public:
BANK OF CANAAN
CRITTENTON MADEIRA
When the man and the girl had gone into the Bank of Canaan, the
group at the Grange stopped gambling on the incoming teams and
talked less drowsily.
"Looks like that girl gets purdier and purdier."
"Mighty pleasant ways she keeps. Never gone back on her raisin'.
Never got too good for Mizzourah."
"As far as I go, I like her ways better'n her pappy's ways."
"Crit is a little toploftical."
"They mighty fond of each other, though. Seems like she's not in a
hurry to marry and leave her pappy."
"Wall naow, I shouldn't be s'prised ef Miss Sally never did git married,
talkin' abaout marryin'. 'Twould not s'prise me a-tall, 'twouldn't." Mr.
Quin Beasley was talking. Mr. Beasley was the keeper of the Grange
store and admittedly a man of fine conversational powers. His jaws

worked on and he seemed able to get nutriment out of his ruminations
long after a cow would have gone back to grass hungrily. "Aint sayin' I
never am s'prised, becuz am, but do say that that wouldn't s'prise me,
an' no more would it." Mr. Beasley brought his jaws in from their loose
meanderings just as the clatter of a horse's hoofs became audible down
the side street that, a little way along, became the road to Poetical.
"Name the comer, Beasley. Up to the sugar-tree about now. Name-er,
name-er!"