The Gentleman from Indiana | Page 5

an unknown
past; no one knew more about him than that he had been connected
with a university somewhere, and had travelled in unheard-of countries
before he came to Plattville. A glamour of romance was thrown about
him by the gossips, to whom he ever proved a fund of delightful
speculation. There was a dark, portentous secret in his life, it was
agreed; an opinion not too well confirmed by the old man's appearance.
His fine eyes had a pathetic habit of wandering to the horizon in a
questioning fashion that had a queer sort of hopelessness in it, as if his
quest were one for the Holy Grail, perhaps; and his expression was
mild, vague, and sad. He had a look of race and blood; and yet, at the
first glance, one saw that he was lost in dreams, and one guessed that
the dreams would never be of great practicability in their application.
Some such impression of Fisbee was probably what caused the editor
of the "Herald" to nickname him (in his own mind) "The White
Knight," and to conceive a strong, if whimsical, fancy for him.
Old Fisbee had come (from nobody knew where) to Plattville to teach,
and had been principal of the High School for ten years, instructing his
pupils after a peculiar fashion of his own, neglecting the ordinary
courses of High School instruction to lecture on archaeology to the
dumfounded scholars; growing year by year more forgetful and absent,
lost in his few books and his own reflections, until, though undeniably
a scholar, he had been discharged for incompetency. He was old; he
had no money and no way to make money; he could find nothing to do.
The blow had seemed to daze him for a time; then he began to drop in
al the hotel bar, where Wilkerson, the professional drunkard, favored
him with his society. The old man understood; he knew it was the
beginning of the end. He sold his books in order to continue his credit
at the Palace bar, and once or twice, unable to proceed to his own
dwelling, spent the night in a lumber yard, piloted thither by the hardier
veteran, Wilkerson.
The morning after the editor took him home, Fisbee appeared at the
"Herald" office in a new hat and a decent suit of black. He had received

his salary in advance, his books had been repurchased, and he had
become the reportorial staff of the "Carlow County Herald"; also, he
was to write various treatises for the paper. For the first few evenings,
when he started home from the office, his chief walked with him,
chatting heartily, until they had passed the Palace bar. But Fisbee's
redemption was complete.
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. When the vistas of
the world had opened to his first youth, he had not thought to spend his
life in such a place as Plattville; but he found himself doing it, and it
was no great happiness to him that the congressional representative of
the district, the gentleman whom the "Herald's" opposition to McCune
had sent to Washington, came to depend on his influence for
renomination; nor did the realization that the editor of the "Carlow
County Herald" had come to be McCune's successor as political
dictator produce a perceptibly enlivening effect on the young man. The
years drifted very slowly, and to him it seemed they went by while he
stood far aside and could not even see them move. He did not consider
the life he led an exciting one; but the other citizens of Carlow did
when he undertook a war against the "White Caps." The natives were
much more afraid of the "White Caps" than he was; they knew more
about them and understood them better than he did.
CHAPTER II
THE STRANGE LADY
IT was June. From the patent inner columns of the "Carlow County
Herald" might be gleaned the information (enlivened by cuts of
duchesses) that the London season had reached a high point of gaiety;
and that, although the weather had grown inauspiciously warm, there
was sufficient gossip for the thoughtful. To the rapt mind of Miss

Selina Tibbs came a delicious moment of comparison: precisely the
same conditions prevailed in Plattville.
Not unduly might Miss Selina lay this flattering unction to her soul,
and well might the "Herald" declare that "Carlow events were crowding
thick and fast." The congressional representative of the district was to
deliver a lecture at the