The Fighting Shepherdess

Few in Prouty denied that there were forty-eight hours in the day that began about six o'clock on Saturday night and lasted until the same hour Monday morning. If there had been some way of taking a mild anesthetic to have carried them through this period, many no doubt would have resorted to it, for oblivion was preferable to consciousness during a Sunday in Prouty.

It could not, strictly, be called a Day of Rest, because there was not sufficient business during the week to make any one tired enough to need it.

When the church bells tinkled, the Episcopalians bowed patronizingly to the Presbyterians, the Presbyterians condescendingly recognized the Methodists, the Methodists, by a slight inclination of the head, acknowledged the existence of the Catholics. This done, the excitement of the day was over.

The footsteps of a chance pedestrian echoed in Main Street like some one walking in a tunnel. Children flattened their noses against the panes and looked out wistfully upon a world that had no joy in it.

The gloom of financial depression hung over Prouty like a crepe veil. If Prouty spent Sunday waiting for Monday, it spent the rest of the week waiting for something to happen. Prouty's attitude was one of halfhearted expectancy--like a shipwrecked sailor knowing himself outside the line of travel, yet unable to resist watching the horizon for succor.

The Boosters Club still went on boosting, but its schemes for self-advertisement resembled a defective pin-wheel, which, after the first whiz, lacks the motive powers to turn further. The motive power in this instance was money. Prouty wanted money with the same degree of intensity that the parched Lazarus wanted water.

Real estate owners in Prouty regarded their property without enthusiasm, for there were few residences not ornamented with a "plaster" in the form of a mortgage. Abram Pantin's boast that he never "held the sack" was heard but seldom, for there was more than a reasonable doubt that he was able to collect the interest on his farm mortgages, to say nothing of the principal.

The town was at a stage when merely to eat and go on wearing clothes was cause for self-congratulation. It was conceded that a person who could exist in Prouty could live anywhere. Its citizens seemed to partake of the nature of the cactus that, grubbed up and left for dead, always manages somehow to get its roots down again.

The Prouty Grit still called the attention of the world to the country's natural resources, but Mr. Butefish's editorials had a hollow ring, like the "spiel" of the sideshow barker, who talks in anticipation of a swift kick from a dissatisfied patron.