Windy McPhersons Son | Page 7

have a Fourth of July celebration. The idea, born in the
heads of the few, had been taken up by the many. Rumours of it had
run through the streets late in May. It had been talked of in Geiger's
drug store, at the back of Wildman's grocery, and in the street before
the New Leland House. John Telfer, the town's one man of leisure, had
for weeks been going from place to place discussing the details with
prominent men. Now a mass meeting was to be held in the hall over
Geiger's drug store and to a man the citizens of Caxton had turned out
for the meeting. The housepainter had come down off his ladder, the
clerks were locking the doors of the stores, men went along the streets
in groups bound for the hall. As they went they shouted to each other.
"The old town has woke up," they called.
On a corner by Hunter's jewelry store Windy McPherson leaned against
a building and harangued the passing crowd.
"Let the old flag wave," he shouted excitedly, "let the men of Caxton
show the true blue and rally to the old standards."
"That's right, Windy, expostulate with them," shouted a wit, and a roar
of laughter drowned Windy's reply.
Sam McPherson also went to the meeting in the hall. He came out of
the grocery store with Wildman and went along the street looking at the
sidewalk and trying not to see the drunken man talking in front of the
jewelry store. At the hall other boys stood in the stairway or ran up and
down the sidewalk talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the town's
life and his right to push in among the men was not questioned. He
squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window
ledge where he could watch the men come in and find seats.
As Caxton's one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both
a living and a kind of standing in the town's life. To be a newsboy or a
bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure
in the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become
great men and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day
after day likely to become such a figure? Is it not a duty we of the town
owe to future greatness that we push him forward? So reasoned the

men of Caxton and paid a kind of court to the boy who sat on the
window ledge of the hall while the other boys of the town waited on the
sidewalk below.
John Telfer was chairman of the mass meeting. He was always
chairman of public meetings in Caxton. The industrious silent men of
position in the town envied his easy, bantering style of public address,
while pretending to treat it with scorn. "He talks too much," they said,
making a virtue of their own inability with apt and clever words.
Telfer did not wait to be appointed chairman of the meeting, but went
forward, climbed the little raised platform at the end of the hall, and
usurped the chairmanship. He walked up and down on the platform
bantering with the crowd, answering gibes, calling to well-known men,
getting and giving keen satisfaction with his talent. When the hall was
filled with men he called the meeting to order, appointed committees
and launched into a harangue. He told of plans made to advertise the
big day in other towns and to get low railroad rates arranged for
excursion parties. The programme, he said, included a musical carnival
with brass bands from other towns, a sham battle by the military
company at the fairgrounds, horse races, speeches from the steps of the
town hall, and fireworks in the evening. "We'll show them a live town
here," he declared, walking up and down the platform and swinging his
cane, while the crowd applauded and shouted its approval.
When a call came for voluntary subscriptions to pay for the fun, the
audience quieted down. One or two men got up and started to go out,
grumbling that it was a waste of money. The fate of the celebration was
on the knees of the gods.
Telfer arose to the occasion. He called out the names of the departing,
and made jests at their expense so that they dropped back into their
chairs unable to face the roaring laughter of the crowd, and shouted to a
man at the back of the hall to close and bolt the door. Men began
getting up in various parts of the hall and calling out sums, Telfer
repeating the name and the amount in a loud voice to young Tom