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A Breath Of Prairie
by
The moisture in his eyes deepened and a tightness gripped his throat. Slowly two great tears fought their way down through the dust on his face, and dropped lingeringly, one after the other amid the corn-ears.
II
The little, low, weather-white school-house stood glaring solitarily in the bright starlight, from out its setting of brown, hard-trodden prairie. Within, the assembled farmers were packed tight and regular in the seats and aisles, like kernels on an ear of corn. In the front of the room a little space had been shelled bare for the speaker, and the displaced human kernels thereto incident were scattered crouching in the narrow hall and anteroom. From without, groups of men denied admittance, thrust hairy faces in at the open windows. A row of dusty, grease-covered lamps flanked by composition metal reflectors, concentrated light upon the shelled spot, leaving the remainder of the room in variant shadow. The low murmur of suppressed conversation, accompanied by the unconscious shuffling of restless feet, sounded through the place. Becoming constantly more noticeable, an unpleasant, penetrating odor, of the unclean human animal filled the room.
Guy Landers sat on a crowded back seat, where, leaning one elbow on his knee, he shaded his eyes with his hand. On his right a big, sweaty farmer was smoking a stale pipe. The smell of the cheap, vile tobacco, bad as it was, became a welcome substitute for the odor of the man himself.
At his left were two boys of his own age, splendid, both of them, with the overflowing vitality that makes all young animals splendid. They were talking–of women. They spoke low, watching sheepishly whether any one was listening, and snickering suppressedly together.
The young man’s head dropped in his hands. It all depressed him like a weight. From the depths of his soul he despised them for their vulgarity, and hated himself for so doing, for he was of their life and work akin. He shut his eyes, suffering blindly.
Consciousness returned at the sound of a strangely soft voice, and he looked up a little bewildered. A swarm of night-bugs encircled each of the greasy lamps, blindly beating out their lives against the hot chimney; but save this and the soft voice there was no other sound. The man at the right held his pipe in his hand; to the left the boys had ceased whispering; one and all were listening to the speaker with the stolid, expressionless gaze of interested animals.
Guy Landers could not have told why he had come that night. Perhaps it was in response to that gregarious instinct which prompts us all at times to mingle with a crowd; certainly he had not expected to be interested. Thus it was with almost a feeling of rebellious curiosity that he caught himself listening intently.
The speech was political, the speaker a college man. What he said was immaterial–not a listener but had heard the same arguments a dozen times before; it was the man himself that held them.
What the farmers in that dingy little room saw was a smooth-faced young man, with blue eyes set far apart and light hair that exposed the temples far back; they heard a soft voice which made them forget for a time that they were very tired–forget all else but that he was speaking.
Landers saw further: not a single man, but a type; the concrete illustration of a vague ideal he had long known. He realized as the others did not, that the speaker was merely practising on them–training, as the man himself would have said. When Landers was critically conscious, he was not deceived; yet, with this knowledge, at times he forgot and moved along with the speaker, unconsciously.
It was all deliriously intoxicating to the farmer–this first understanding glimpse of things he had before merely dreamed of–and he waited exultantly for those brief moments when he felt, sympathetically with the speaker, the keen joy of mastery in perfect art; that joy beside which no other of earth can compare, the compelling magnetism which carries another’s mind irresistibly along with one’s own.