an entirely sober one in the auditorium. Driscoll was promptly and
indignantly flung on the heads of Sons in the next row, and these Sons
passed him on toward the rear, and then immediately began to pummel the
front row Sons who had passed him to them. This course was strictly
followed by bench after bench as Driscoll traveled in his tumultuous
and airy flight toward the door; so he left behind him an ever-lengthening
wake of raging and plunging and fighting and swearing humanity.
Down went group after group of torches, and presently above the
deafening clatter of the gavel, roar of angry voices, and crash of
succumbing benches, rose the paralyzing cry of “_fire!_”
The fighting ceased instantly; the cursing ceased; for one distinctly
defined moment, there was a dead hush, a motionless calm, where the
tempest had been; then with one impulse the multitude awoke to life
and energy again, and went surging and struggling and swaying,
this way and that, its outer edges melting away through windows and
doors and gradually lessening the pressure and relieving the mass.
The fireboys were never on hand so suddenly before; for there was
no distance to go this time, their quarters being in the rear end
of the market house, There was an engine company and a
hook-and-ladder company. Half of each was composed of rummies and
the other half of anti-rummies, after the moral and political
share-and-share-alike fashion of the frontier town of the period.
Enough anti-rummies were loafing in quarters to man the engine
and the ladders. In two minutes they had their red shirts and helmets on–
they never stirred officially in unofficial costume–and as the
mass meeting overhead smashed through the long row of windows and
poured out upon the roof of the arcade, the deliverers were ready
for them with a powerful stream of water, which washed some of them
off the roof and nearly drowned the rest. But water was preferable
to fire, and still the stampede from the windows continued, and still the
pitiless drenching assailed it until the building was empty;
then the fireboys mounted to the hall and flooded it with water enough
to annihilate forty times as much fire as there was there;
for a village fire company does not often get a chance to show off,
and so when it does get a chance, it makes the most of it.
Such citizens of that village as were of a thoughtful and judicious
temperament did not insure against fire; they insured against the
fire company.
CHAPTER 12
The Shame of Judge Driscoll
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear–not absence of fear.
Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say
it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word.
Consider the flea!–incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God,
if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he
will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength
you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child;
he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap
of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more
afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was
threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak
of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who “didn’t know what fear was,”
we ought always to add the flea–and put him at the head of the procession.
–Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar
Judge Driscoll was in bed and asleep by ten o’clock on Friday night,
and he was up and gone a-fishing before daylight in the morning with
his friend Pembroke Howard. These two had been boys together in
Virginia when that state still ranked as the chief and most imposing
member of the Union, and they still coupled the proud and affectionate
adjective “old” with her name when they spoke of her.
In Missouri a recognized superiority attached to any person who
hailed from Old Virginia; and this superiority was exalted to
supremacy when a person of such nativity could also prove descent