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 at 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.