In a Little Town

When she was told it was a girl, Mrs. Govers sighed. "Well, I never did have any luck, anyway; so I d' know's I'm supprised."

Later she wept feebly:

"Girls are easier to raise, I suppose; but I kind of had my heart set on namin' him Launcelot." After another interval she rallied to a smile: "I was prepared for the worst, though; so I picked out Ellaphine for a name in case he was a her. It's an awful pirty name, Ellaphine is. Don't you think so?"

"Yes, yes," said the nurse, who would have agreed to anything then.

After a time Mrs. Govers resumed: "She'll be an awful pirty girl, I hope. Is that her makin' all that noise? Give me a glimpse of her, will you? I got a right, I guess, to see my own baby. Oh, Goshen! Is that how she looks?" A kind of swoon; then more meditation, followed by a courageous philosophy: "Children always look funny at first. She'll outgrow it, I expect. Ellaphine is such an elegant name. It ought to be a kind of inducement to grow up to. Don't you think so?"

The nurse, who was juggling the baby as if it were red-hot, mumbled through a mustache of safety-pins that she thought so. Mrs. Govers echoed, "I thought so, too." After that she went to sleep.

Ellaphine, however, did not grow up elegant, to fit the name. The name grew inelegant to fit her. During her earliest years the witty little children called her Elephant until they tired of the ingenuity and allowed her to lapse indolently from Ellar to El.

Mrs. Govers for some years cherished a dream that her ugly duckling would develop into a swan and fly away with a fabulously wealthy prince. Later she dwindled to a prayer that she might capture a man who was "tol'able well-to-do."

The majority of ugly ducklings, however, grow up into uglier ducks, and Mrs. Govers resigned herself to the melancholy prospect of the widowed mother of an old maid perennial.

To the confusion of prophecy, among all the batch of girls who descended on Carthage about the time of Ellaphine's birth-"out of the nowhere into the here"-Ellaphine was the first to be married! And she cut out the prettiest girl in the township-it was not such a small township, either.

Those homely ones seem to make straight for a home the first thing. Ellaphine carried off Eddie Pouch-the very Eddie of whom his mother used to say, "He's little, but oh, my!" The rest of the people said, "Oh, my, but he's little!"

Eddie's given name was Egbert. Edward was his taken name. He took it after his mother died and he went to live at his uncle Loren's. Eddie was sorry to change his name, but he said his mother was not responsible at the time she pasted the label Egbert on him, and his shy soul could not endure to be called Egg by his best friends-least of all by his best girl.

His best girl was the township champion looker, Luella Thickins. From the time his heart was big enough for Cupid to stick a child's-size arrow in, Eddie idolized Luella. So did the other boys; and as Eddie was the smallest of the lot, he was lost in the crowd. Even when Luella noticed him it was with the atrocious contempt of little girls for little boys they do not like.

Eddie could not give her sticks of candy or jawbreakers, for his uncle Loren did not believe in spending money. And Eddie had no mother to go to when the boys mistreated him and the girls ignored him. A dismal life he led until he grew up as far as he ever grew up.

Eddie reached his twenty-second birthday and was working in Uncle Loren's factory-one of the largest feather-duster factories in the whole State-when he observed a sudden change in Luella's manner.

She had scared him away from paying court to her, save from a distance. Now she took after him, with her aggressive beauty for a club and her engaging smiles for a net. She asked him to take her to the Sunday-school picnic, and asked him what he liked best for her to put in for him. She informed him that she was going to cook it for herself and everybody said she could fry chicken something grand. So he chose fried chicken.

He was so overjoyed that it was hard for him to be as solemn about the house as he ought to have been, in view of the fact that Uncle Loren had been taken suddenly and violently ill. Eddie was the natural heir to the old man's fortune.

Uncle Loren was considered close in a town where extravagance was almost impossible, but where rigid economy was supposed to pile up tremendous wealth. Hitherto it had pained Uncle Loren to devote a penny to anything but the sweet uses of investment. Now it suddenly occurred to the old miser that he had invested nothing in the securities of New Jerusalem, Limited. He was frightened immeasurably.

In his youth he had joined the Campbellite church and had been baptized in the town pond when there was a crust of ice over it which the pastor had to break with a stick before he immersed Loren. Everybody said the crust of ice had stuck to his heart ever since.

In the panic that came on him now he craftily decided to transfer all his savings to the other shore. The factory, of course, he must leave behind; but he drafted a hasty will presenting all his money to the Campbellite church under conditions that he counted on to gain him a high commercial rating in heaven.

Over his shoulder, as he wrote, a shadow waited, grinning; and the old man had hardly folded his last testament and stuffed it into his pillow-slip when the grisly hand was laid on his shoulders and Uncle Loren was no longer there.

His uncle's demise cut Eddie out of the picnic with Luella; but she was present at the funeral and gave him a wonderful smile. Uncle Loren's final will was not discovered until the pillow-slip was sent to the wash; and at the funeral Eddie was still the object of more or less disguised congratulations as an important heir.

Luella solaced him with rare tact and tenderness, and spoke much of his loneliness and his need of a helpmate. Eddie resolved to ask her to marry him as soon as he could compose the speech.

Some days later Uncle Loren's farewell will turned up, and Eddie fell from grace with a thump. The town laughed at him, as people always laugh when a person-particularly so plump a person as Eddie was-falls hard on the slippery sidewalk of this icy world.

In his dismay he hastened to Luella for sympathy, but she turned up missing. She jilted him with a jolt that knocked his heart out of his mouth. He stood, as it were, gaping stupidly, in the middle of the highway.

Then Ellaphine Govers came along, picked his heart out of the road, dusted it, and offered it back. He was so grateful that he asked her to keep it for him. He was so pitiable an object that he felt honored even by the support of Ellar Govers.

He went with Ellar quite a lot. He found her very comfortable company. She seemed flattered by his attention. Other people acted as if they were doing him a favor by letting him stand around.

He had lost Uncle Loren's money, but he still had a small job at the factory. Partly to please Ellar and partly to show certain folks that he was not yet dead, he took her out for a drive behind a livery-stable horse. It was a beautiful drive, and the horse was so tame that it showed no desire to run away. It was perfectly willing to stand still where the view was good.

He let Ellar drive awhile, and that was the only time the horse misbehaved. It saw a stack of hay, nearly went mad, and tried to climb a rail fence; but Ellar yelled at it and slapped the lines at it and got it past the danger zone, and it relapsed into its usual mood of despair.

Eddie told Ellar the horse was "attackted with haydrophobia." And she nearly laughed herself to death and said:

"You do say the funniest things!"

She was a girl who could appreciate a fellow's jokes, and he saw that they could have awful good times together. He told her so without difficulty and she agreed that they could, and they were as good as engaged before they got back as far as the fair-grounds. As they came into the familiar streets Eddie observed a remarkable change in the manner of the people they passed. People made an effort to attract his eye. They wafted him salutes from a distance. He encountered such a lifting of hats, elaborateness of smiles and flourish of hands, that he said to Ellaphine:

"Say, Pheeny, I wonder what the joke is!"

"Me, I guess," sighed Ellaphine. "They're makin' fun of you for takin' me out buggy-ridin'."

"Ah, go on!" said Eddie. "They've found out something about me and they're pokin' fun."

He was overcome with shame and drove to Ellaphine's house by a side street and escorted the horse to the livery-stable by a back alley. On his way home he tried in vain to dodge Luella Thickins, but she headed him off with one of her Sunday-best smiles. She bowled him over by an effusive manner.

"Why, Eddie, you haven't been round to see me for the longest time! Can't you come on over 'safternoon? I'd just love to see you!"

He wondered whether she had forgotten how she had ground his meek heart under her heel the last time he called.

She was so nice to him that she frightened him. He mumbled that he would certainly call that afternoon, and got away, wondering what the trick was. Her smile seemed less pretty than it used to be.

A block farther on Eddie met a man who explained the news, which had run across the town like oil on water. Tim Holdredge, an idle lawyer who had nothing else to do, looked into the matter of Uncle Loren's will and found that the old man, in his innocence of charity and his passion for economy, had left his money to the church on conditions that were not according to the law. The money reverted to the estate. Eddie was the estate.

When Tim Holdredge slapped Eddie on the shoulder and explained the result of what he called "the little joker" in Uncle Loren's will, Eddie did not rejoice, as Tim had a right to expect.

Eddie was poisoned by a horrible suspicion. The logic of events ran through his head like a hateful tune which he could not shake off:

"When Luella thought I was coming into a pile of money she was nice to me. When she heard I wasn't she was mean to me. Now that my money's coming to me, after all, she's nice again. Therefore-" But he was ashamed to give that ungallant ergo brain room.

Still more bewildering was the behavior of Ellaphine. As soon as he heard of his good fortune he hurried to tell her about it. Her mother answered the door-bell and congratulated him on his good luck. When he asked for Ellar, her mother said, "She was feelin' right poorly, so she's layin' down." He was so alarmed that he forgot about Luella, who waited the whole afternoon all dressed up.

After supper that night he patrolled before Ellaphine's home and tried to pluck up courage enough to twist that old door-bell again. Suddenly she ran into him. She was sneaking through the front gate. He tried to talk to her, but she said:

"I'm in a tur'ble hurry. I got to go to the drug-store and get some chloroform liniment. Mamma's lumbago's awful bad."

He walked along with her, though she tried to escape him. The first drowsy lamp-post showed him that Ellaphine had been crying. It was the least becoming thing she could have done. Eddie asked whether her mother was so sick as all that. She said "No"-then changed to "Yes"-and then stopped short and began to blubber uncouthly, dabbing her eyes alternately with the backs of her wrists.

Eddie stared awhile, then yielded to an imperious urge to clasp her to his heart and comfort her. She twisted out of his arms, and snapped, "Don't you touch me, Eddie Pouch!"

Eddie mumbled, inanely, "You didn't mind it this mornin', buggy-ridin'."

Her answer completely flabbergasted him:

"No; because you didn't have all that money then."

"Gee whiz, Pheeny!" he gasped. "What you got against Uncle Loren's money? It ain't a disease, is it? It's not ketchin', is it?"

"No," she sobbed; "but we-Well, when you were so poor and all, I thought you might-you might really like me because I could be of some-of some use to you; but now you-you needn't think I'm goin' to hold you to any-anything against your will."

Eddie realized that across the street somebody had stopped to listen. Eddie wanted to throw a rock at whoever it was, but Ellaphine absorbed him as she wailed:

"It 'd be just like you to be just's nice to me as ever; but I'm not goin' to tie you down to any homely old crow like me when you got money enough to marry anybody. You can get Luella Thickins back now. You could marry the Queen of England if you'd a mind to."

Eddie could find nothing better to say than, "Well, I'll be dog-on'd!"

While he gaped she got away.